Atomic Pt anchored on hierarchically porous monolithic carbon nanowires as high-performance catalyst for liquid hydrogenation

Monolithic catalysts play a crucial role in various catalytic applications, e.g., chemical synthesis, energy conversion, and environmental treatment, but their catalytic efficiency is often limited by the restricted mass transfer and insufficient exposure of active sites. Herein, we present a dual-templating strategy to fabricate atomic Pt dispersed on monolithic N-doped mesoporous carbon nanowires (Pt₁/NMCW) with abundant super-/macropores, which, as monolithic catalyst, exhibits high catalytic performance in hydrogenation of 4-nitrophenol (4-NP). During synthesis, triblock copolymer (Pluronic F127) is employed as a primary soft template to generate the mesoporous structured carbon nanowires to improve the accessibility of Pt single sites; KCl crystallite is used as a secondary hard template to create the super-/macropores, which are beneficial for enhancing the mass transfer efficiency. Thanks to the dual-templating strategy that creates the monolithic carbon nanowires with hierarchically porous structure, the obtained Pt₁/NMCW shows highly enhanced catalytic activity in 4-NP hydrogenation, outperforming its analogue synthesized without using KCl as template and being comparable to the nano-powder catalyst (i.e., atomic Pt loaded on the N-doped carbon nanospheres, Pt₁/NCS).