Self-Template Construction of High-Performance Co, N-Decorated Carbon Nanotubes from a Novel Cobalt Dicyandiamide Molecule

N-doped carbon nanotubes (NCNTs) based composites have shown great prospect in catalysis relevant communities, which are often evolved from commercial CNTs and nitrogenous hybrid precursors. However, the direct fabrication of high-performance and non-noble metal uniformly embedded NCNTs from a single molecule level without foreign ions remains a thorny issue. Herein, we firstly report a high surface area and large diameter NCNTs (215.7 m(2) g(-1), 150 nm) embedded with Co NPs and atomically dispersed CoNx active sites via a facile and self-template pyrolysis of a novel synthesized cobalt dicyanamide molecule. The resulting Co@NCNTs-800 catalyst exhibits superior catalytic activity toward nitrobenzene hydrogenation compared to the catalyst prepared from a mixture of dicyandiamide and CoCl2 under mild conditions (>99 % vs. 1.3 % conversion). Furthermore, it also presents a prominent activity and selectivity for the hydrogenation of various nitroaromatics, and possesses the best catalytic performance compared to the existing non-noble metal-based heterogeneous catalytic systems.

Automated summary

The study successfully prepared a high-performance Co@NCNTs catalyst by self-template pyrolysis of a cobalt dicyanamide molecule, embedding Co NPs and CoNx active sites uniformly in NCNTs, showing excellent catalytic activity and selectivity for the hydrogenation of nitrobenzene.