Highly efficient dehydrogenation of hydrazine borane over CoIr/TiO2 catalyst

In recent years, hydrazine borane (HB) as an excellent hydrogen material has been extensively studied by researchers because of its substantial hydrogen content (15.4 wt%), favourable chemical stability, eco-friendliness and being easy to synthesize. With Higher activity, catalysts of HB dehydrogenation will undoubtedly be more desirable for practical applications. In this work, CoIr nanoparticles (NPs) are successfully immobilized on TiO2 substrate, achieving outstanding catalytic performance and 100% conversion for HB dehydrogenation. Particularly, Co0.6Ir0.4/TiO2 can complete the reaction for HB dehydrogenation at 323 K within 32 s (0.53 min), and shows a fairly high turnover frequency (TOF) value (5625 h−1), which is higher than the values achieved by most Ni-based catalysts reported so far in the same condition. This superior catalytic performance can be attributed to uniform dispersion of metal NPs with small size and strong interaction among the CoIr NPs and the substrate. It is unquestionable that our work will help to promote the use of HB as a promising hydrogen storage material for fuel cells.