Investigating Catalytic Selectivity of Nanoparticles encapsulated in MOFs

Abstract

Coating porous materials is a potential pathway to improve Catalytic performance of heterogeneous catalysts. The unique properties of Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) like huge surface area, long range order and high tenability make them promising coating materials. However, two traditional MOF encapsulation methods have their own issues. Herein, we synthesized Pt/Pd metal nanoparticles @UiO-66-NH2 via a one-pot in situ method which has good control of nanoparticles size while avoids the introduction of capping agent. The catalytic performance of synthesized Pt@UiO-66-NH2 is tested via selective hydrogenation of Crotonaldehyde. And the selectivity of our desired product achieves 70.42% which is much higher than merchant Pt catalysts. A step further, we used linker exchange to replace the original NH2-BDC linker of which amine group plays an important role in the coating process. After linker exchanging, the significant decreasing in selectivity of our target product demonstrates that the interaction between Pt and amine group does have some positive impacts on their catalytic performance. We hope our research could provide some insights of the MOFs and nanoparticles interface and help rational design of catalysts with high performance.