Carboxyl-functionalized mesoporous poly(ionic liquids) confined ultrafine PdCo nano-alloys to boost selective oxidation of glycerol

In this paper, ultrafine PdCo nano-alloys confined in crosslinked and carboxyl-functionalized mesoporous poly(ionic liquids) catalysts (PdCo@PVCD) were synthesized for selective oxidation of glycerol into glyceric acid. The structure and physiochemical properties of the catalysts were confirmed by FT-IR, TG , XRD , BET, SEM, TEM-EDS and XPS. The results indicated that the resulting PdCo@PVCD catalyst not only exhibited superior catalytic activity for glycerol oxidation but also higher selectivity to glyceric acid than that of the monometallic Pd@PVCD catalyst, specifically glycerol conversion of 92.8% and glyceric acid selectivity of 63.5% at the optimized reaction conditions. It was confirmed that the excellent performance was attributed to the geometric effect of ultrafine and homogeneous PdCo nano-alloys and also electronic modification of Pd by Co. Moreover, the PdCo@PVCD catalyst had outstanding stability with no activity loss after five reusing times, which was benefited from the strong metal-support interaction and spatial confinement.