Facile construction of composition-tuned ruthenium-nickel nanoparticles on g-C3N4 for enhanced hydrolysis of ammonia borane without base additives

Developing high-efficiency and low-cost catalysts for hydrogen evolution from hydrolysis of ammonia borane (AB) is significant and critical for the exploitation and utilization of hydrogen energy. Herein, the in-situ fabrication of well-dispersed and small bimetallic RuNi alloy nanoparticles (NPs) with tuned compositions and concomitant hydrolysis of AB are successfully achieved by using graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) as a NP support without additional stabilizing ligands. The optimized Ru1Ni7.5/g-C3N4 catalyst exhibits an excellent catalytic activity with a high turnover frequency of 901 min(-1) and an activation energy of 28.46 kJ mol(-1) without any base additives, overtaking the activities of many previously reported catalysts for AB hydrolysis. The kinetic studies indicate that the AB hydrolysis over Ru1Ni7.5/g-C3N4 is first-order and zero-order reactions with respect to the catalyst and AB concentrations, respectively. Ru1Ni7.5/g-C3N4 has a good recyclability with 46% of the initial catalytic activity retained even after five runs. The high performance of Ru1Ni7.5/g-C3N4 should be assigned to the small-sized alloy NPs with abundant accessible active sites and the synergistic effect between the composition-tuned Ru-Ni bimetals. This work highlights a potentially powerful and simple strategy for preparing highly active bimetallic alloy catalysts for AB hydrolysis to generate hydrogen. (C) 2021 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The study successfully achieved the in-situ fabrication of RuNi alloy nanoparticles with tuned compositions using graphitic carbon nitride as a support without additional stabilizing ligands. The optimized catalyst exhibited excellent catalytic activity with high recyclability, showing potential for generating hydrogen through ammonia borane hydrolysis.