Selective hydrogenation of phenol by the porous Carbon/ZrO2 supported Ni-Co nanoparticles in subcritical water medium

Phenol is a typical aromatic organic byproduct in the coking industry, which can be also as a raw material for producing some useful chemicals by catalytic hydrogenation. In this paper, by constructing carbon/ZrO2 porous support with abundant vacancies for loading nickel and cobalt nanoparticles (i.e., NixCoy@C/ZrO2) with using Zr-based metal organic frameworks as the precursor, the significant phenol converting enhancement in both hydrothermalcatalytic activity and stability has been fulfilled. Specially, the physiochemical characteristics of the NixCoy@C/ZrO2 particles have been analyzed, which verified the presence of Ni-Co alloy and its high homogeneity and dispersity. The catalytic results showed that the Ni3Co1@C/ZrO2 catalyst has the best catalytic performance at the desired temperature of 200 degrees C for 240 min, and the conversion of phenol is 9633% while the selectivity of cyclohexanol is 9114%. Kinetic study showed that the activation energy was only 44.31 kJ/mol, which reflected that the hydrogenation could be easily carried out with Ni3Co1@C/ZrO2 catalyst. These findings can provide a good guidance for designing and developing the non-noble-metal catalysts for achieving the industrial utilization of phenol in coking wastewater in the future. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.