Communication
Chemistry—A European Journal
doi.org/10.1002/chem.202003492
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Supported Catalysts |Hot Paper|
Facile Synthesis of Size-Controlled Nitrogen-Doped Mesoporous
Carbon Nanosphere Supported Ultrafine Ru Nanoparticles for
[b, c]
+ [a, b]
[a]
[b, c]
Haibin Jiang ,
Minghua Huang,* and Guang-Hui Wang*
[5,6]
achieve specific catalytic properties.
For example, many
Abstract: Nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbon nano-
sphere (NMCS) with tunable sizes and uniform mesoporos-
ity was synthesized by a facile soft-templating method.
During the synthesis, F127 (PEO–PPO–PEO triblock copoly-
mer) could be used not only as a soft template to gener-
ate the mesostructure but also as a size-control agent to
tailor the size of NMCS in a relatively wide range of 100 to
NMC-supported catalysts with various active species, including
metal/metal oxide nanoparticles, metal phosphides/carbides,
and isolated single atoms, have been synthesized successfully,
which in most cases exhibit high activity, excellent selectivity,
[6–11]
and good stability in catalytic reactions.
Besides the active species, design of NMCs with different
features is also one of the key topics for the synthesis of sup-
ported catalysts with enhanced catalytic performance. Especial-
ly, spherical NMC (NMCS) with tunable size is an ideal catalyst
support due to the uniform morphology, highly accessible
700 nm. In addition, the synthesis process was simple and
suitable for large-scale production. Moreover, the NMCS
was used as support of ultrafine Ru nanoparticles (Ru/
NMCS), which exhibited good catalytic performances for
selective hydrogenation of quinolones. It is expected that
the simple synthetic strategy for the NMCS can generate
extensive interest in many catalysis and sorption applica-
tions.
[12,13]
mesochannels, etc.
In general, there are two main meth-
ods to fabricate the NMCS: (1) post-treatment of the presyn-
thesized mesoporous carbon nanospheres (MCS) by N-contain-
ing reagents such as NH , urea, melamine, nitric acid, and
3
[14]
amines; (2) direct synthesis of NMCS by using N-containing
chemicals as both carbon and nitrogen precursors (such as 3-
aminophenol, aniline, dopamine, melamine-formaldehyde, pyr-
role, polyacrylonitrile, etc.) via hard- or soft-templating strat-
egies, where the N atoms can be directly doped into the
Nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbons (NMCs) have attracted
much attention in various applications, such as supercapaci-
tors, batteries, and catalysis, due to their unique properties of
mesoporous structure (leading to high surface area, large pore
volume, etc.) and nitrogen-doped carbon framework (im-
[15,16]
carbon skeleton, not just on the surface.
Although the former is suitable for large-scale synthesis, it
often yields NMCS with non-uniform doping of nitrogen and
unstable mesostructure. The hard-templating strategy in the
later method involves employing nanosized mesoporous
sphere (usually silica) as a template to synthesize the NMCS.
However, this strategy often suffers from the drawbacks of
massive use of the templates and template removal processes,
leading to low production efficiency and high cost. In addition,
the morphology, mesopore size, and diameter of the replicated
[
1–4]
proved basicity and enhanced p-donor capability).
In cataly-
sis, the NMCs exhibit outstanding advantages as catalyst sup-
ports, where the mesoporous structure allows efficient mass
transfer during catalysis, while the nitrogen in the carbon
framework can help to stabilize the supported active species
and even modify their chemical and electronic structure to
NMCS are always limited by the used template, leading to
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[
a] H. Jiang, Prof. M. Huang
[17,18]
poor ability in adjusting the structures of NMCS.
In con-
School of Materials Science and Engineering
Ocean University of China
Qingdao 266100 (P. R. China)
trast, the soft-templating strategy in the later method involves
co-assembling the N-containing precursors with surfactants
(normally triblock copolymers, e.g., Pluronic P123 and F127) to
generate the mesostructured polymer spheres, followed by py-
rolysis to obtain the NMCS. From the perspective of material
synthesis, this is the simplest method to synthesize the NMCS,
where the structural features of NMCS can be easily tailored by
changing the synthesis parameters (e.g., temperature, solvent,
E-mail: huangminghua@ouc.edu.cn
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[
b] Z. Tian, H. Jiang, Prof. G.-H. Wang
Key Laboratory of Biofuels
Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Qingdao, 266101 (P. R. China)
E-mail: wanggh@qibebt.ac.cn
+
[
c] Z. Tian, Prof. G.-H. Wang
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Beijing, 100049 (P. R. China)
pH, concentration of precursors, etc.) of co-assembling pro-
[19,20]
cess.
Therefore, direct synthesis of NMCS with tunable
sizes via soft-templating strategy is highly attractive for scale-
up production and application in catalysis.
+
[
] These authors contributed equally to this work.
Supporting information and the ORCID identification number(s) for the
Herein, we develop a facile soft-templating method for di-
rectly synthesizing the NMCS with tunable sizes using 3-amino-
Chem. Eur. J. 2020, 26, 1 – 6
1
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