Synergistic Enhancement of Electrocatalytic Nitroarene Hydrogenation over MoC@MoS Heteronanorods with Dual Active-sites

Overview

Journal Chem Sci

Publisher Royal Society of Chemistry

Specialty Chemistry

Date 2024 Mar 8

PMID 38455027

Authors

Wanling Zhang

Wenbiao Zhang

Kun Yu

Jingwen Tan

Yi Tang

Qingsheng Gao

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Electrocatalytic hydrogenation (ECH) enables the sustainable production of chemicals under ambient conditions, in which catalysts catering for the different chemisorption of reactants/intermediates are desired but still challenging. Here, MoC@MoS heteronanorods with dual active-sites are developed to accomplish efficient nitroarene ECH according to our theoretical prediction that the binding of atomic H and nitro substrates would be synergistically strengthened on MoC-MoS interfaces. They afford high faradaic efficiency (>85%), yield (>78%) and selectivity (>99%) for the reduction of 4-nitrostyrene (4-NS) to 4-vinylaniline (4-VA) in neutral electrolytes, outperforming not only the single-component counterparts of MoC nanorods and MoS nanosheets, but also recently reported noble-metals. Accordingly, Raman spectroscopy combined with electrochemical tests clarifies the rapid ECH of 4-NS on MoC-MoS interfaces due to the facilitated elementary steps, quickly refreshing active sites for continuous electrocatalysis. MoC@MoS further confirms efficient and selective ECH toward functional anilines with other well-retained reducible groups in wide substrate scope, underscoring the promise of dual-site engineering for exploring catalysts.

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