A Highly Active N-Doped Carbon Supported CoFe Alloy Catalyst for Hydroformylation of C8 Olefins

The development of inexpensive and efficient Co-based heterogeneous catalysts for hydroformylation reactions remains an enormous challenge. In this paper, N-doped carbon supported CoFe bimetallic catalysts (CoFe/NC) are successfully synthesized through a simple thermal decomposition of a mixture of Co(acac)2 and Fe(acac)3, and melamine with activated carbon in N2 atmosphere. With the CoFe/NC-800 as the catalyst, hydroformylation of diisobutene proceeded smoothly in THF under 4 MPa syngas at 130 °C to obtain 92% conversion of diisobutene and 79.6% selectivity to isononyl aldehydes. Detailed studies revealed that the N-doped carbon supported FeCo alloy may be the active species in which nitrogen might act as ligand played an important role in improvement of catalytic performance of hydroformylation reactions. The present study provided meaningful insights into tuning the catalytic performance of non-noble metal heterogeneous catalysts for carbonylation reaction.