LAUSR

The highly efficient hydrogen generation from formic acid is a vital process in clean energy and chemical industry fields. In this work, a universal and efficient surface amine-implanting approach (SAIA) has been proposed for fabricating highly active nanocatalysts with controllable nucleation and growth of downsized metal nanoparticles (NPs) and desired environments around the active sites. The highly dispersed ultrafine palladium NPs supported by the amine-implanted porous carbon (Pd/APC) exhibited superior catalytic activity and high selectivity for the dehydrogenation of formic acid under mild conditions, which afford nearly three-fold increase of the catalytic activity. Detailed investigation demonstrates that the amine species densely implanted on the pore surface of carbon by hydrothermal treatment with ammonium hydroxide play important roles in both dispersing the metal NPs and promoting the catalytic processes. The approach provides a powerful entry into highly active catalysts to elicit enhanced catalytic performance for various catalytic reactions and promote the dehydrogenation of formic acid for practical applications.