Room-temperature efficient oxidative desulfurization over tungsten doped defective UiO-66 catalyst

UiO-66 materials have the benefit of excellent stability, porosity, huge surface area, and presence of flaws, hence designing oxidative desulfurization (ODS) catalysts based on UiO-66 is very appealing. Herein, tungsten doped UiO-66 materials were synthesized with post-doping and in situ synthesis methods, and used as heterogeneous catalysts for the room-temperature oxidative desulfurization reactions. The successful doping of tungsten into the UiO-66 framework was demonstrated by FT-IR, UV–Vis, Raman and TGA characterizations. XAS characterization disclosed that tungsten element formed Zr-O-W bond on the defect sites for the tungsten doped UiO-66 materials. At the same time, the in situ synthesized W 2 @U-150 catalyst revealed the highest 98.5% of dibenzothiophene (DBT) elimination within 1h of desulfurization reaction as well as the biggest catalytic efficiency of 17727.3 h −1 mol −1 at room temperature due to its smallest band gap energy of 3.32 eV, highest tungsten content of 9.8 %, and most Lewis acid amount of 47.1 μmol/g. In addition, the synthesized W 2 @U-150 catalyst showed excellent re-usability for five cycles.