Predominant performance of a nitrogen-doped carbon confined NiCo alloy catalyst fabricated by a natural resource encapsulation strategy for tandem catalytic nitroarenes with alcohols

The auricularia auricula (termed as AA), which is regarded as a specific natural resource due to its strong swelling characteristic. However, the weak water solubility of bimetallic organic frameworks (bi-MOFs) has not allowed it to be a well guest component to encapsulate into the cell walls of AA. So finding a water-soluble bi-MOFs to encapsulate into AA is the key to prepare the highly dispersed alloy catalyst for heterogeneous catalytic reactions. Therefore, a bi-metallic water-soluble NiCo MOFs (named as NiCo- hmta ) encapsulated into AA (termed NiCo- hmta @AA) composite via chemical interaction was synthesized. Subsequently, a nitrogen-doped carbon confined NiCo alloy catalyst (named as NiCo@CN- hmta -CA) derived from NiCo- hmta @AA composite was prepared. The developed NiCo@CN- hmta -CA exhibited superior performance for tandem catalytic nitroarenes with alcohols in comparison with classic NiCo/CN- hmta -PA (pyrolysis of composite towards AA derived CN supported NiCo- hmta ), NiCo@CN- hmta (direct pyrolysis of NiCo- hmta ) catalysts. Various characterizations (e.g. XRD, SEM, HADDF-STEM) were conducted to explore the origin improvement of NiCo@CN- hmta -CA catalyst for tandem catalytic nitroarenes with alcohols. The strategy, natural resource encapsulated MOFs materials, was employed in this work may open up a new avenue for the design and synthesis of highly dispersed alloy catalysts for other heterogeneous catalytic reactions.