An efficient and reusable bimetallic Ni3Fe NPs@C catalyst for selective hydrogenation of biomass-derived levulinic acid to γ-valerolactone

Bimetallic nanostructures have attracted great interest as efficient catalyst to enhance activity, selectivity and stability in catalytical conversion. Herein, we report a facile one-pot carbothermal route to in-situ controllable synthesize heterogeneous bimetallic Ni3Fe [email protected] nanocatalyst. The X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and N2 adsorption-description results reveal that the Ni3Fe alloy nanoparticles are evenly embedded in carbon matrix. The as-prepared Ni3Fe [email protected] catalyst shows excellent selective hydrogenation catalytic performance toward the conversion of levulinic acid (LA) to γ-valerolactone (GVL) via both direct hydrogenation (DH) and transfer hydrogenation (TH). In DH of LA, the bimetallic catalyst achieved a 93.8% LA conversion efficiency with a 95.5% GVL selectivity and 38.2 mmol g−1 h−1 GVL productivity (under 130 °C, 2MPa H2 within 2 h), which are 6 and 40 times in comparison with monometallic Ni [email protected] and Fe [email protected] catalysts, respectively. In addition, the identical catalyst displayed a full conversion of LA with almost 100% GVL selectivity and 167.1 mmol g−1 h−1 GVL productivity at 180 °C within 0.5 h in TH of LA. Under optimal reaction conditions, the DH and TH catalytic performance of 500-Ni3Fe [email protected](3:1) catalyst for converting LA to GVL is comparable to the state-of-the-art noble-based catalysts. The demonstrated capability of bimetallic catalyst design approach to introduce dual-catalytic functionality for DH and TH reactions could be adoptable for other catalysis processes.