Nanoparticles sandwiched in hollow amorphous metal–organic frameworks with enhanced diffusion for highly selective benzene oxidation

Abstract

Efficient and selective catalysts are pivotal for the chemical industry. The functionalization of benzene plays a vital role in the petrochemical industry by converting benzene into other value-added chemicals, such as phenols, anilines, etc. In the chemical industry, phenol production is based on the three step cumene process, which produces hazardous cumene hydroperoxide as an intermediate and also equimolar acetone as a coproduct. So, the direct oxidation of benzene to phenol is desirable. Unfortunately, most of the developed catalysts require an elevated temperature and suffer from low conversion. So, here we designed a series of hollow amorphous nanomaterials, based on aMIL-100 with metal nodes of Fe, Cr, Al and Sc, by sandwiching nanoparticles, such as Pt, Rh and Ru, in between hollow amorphous metal–organic frameworks with enhanced diffusion for highly selective benzene oxidation. We have achieved 52% benzene conversion and 99.5% selectivity for phenol.