Monolithic carbon foam-supported Au nanoparticles with excellent catalytic performance in a fixed-bed system

Nitro aromatic waste water pollutants have become a serious issue, constituting a severe hazard to whole ecosystems and public health. Therefore, it is necessary to design high performance catalytic equipment for the reduction of nitroaromatic compounds from contaminated aqueous solutions. Herein, a robust and rapid method is developed to prepare a macroporous monolithic carbon foam with commercial melamine resin foam as the raw material. Then, the prepared monolithic carbon foam is exploited as an excellent 3D porous network to load Au NPs (MCF/Au). The as-prepared MCF/Au monolith can be innovatively utilized to construct a dynamic fixed-bed system. In addition, the as-obtained system exhibits exceptional catalytic reduction performance for 4-nitrophenol (4-NP). More importantly, the continuous flow reactor system shows excellent recyclability and can be reused for at least ten successive runs without apparent loss of activity.