Ultrafine Pt particles on hollow hierarchical porous β zeolites for selective hydrogenation of naphthalene

It is crucial to develop effective heterogeneous catalysts for the production of decalin as a high-density liquid hydrogen storage material from naphthalene hydrogenation. In this work, hollow hierarchical Pt/Hβ catalysts with ultrafine Pt particles were successfully synthesized successfully. The construction of hollow cavity optimized the metal-support interaction and reduced the resistance of mass diffusion. The ultrafine Pt species could expose more active sites for effective hydrogenation of naphthalene. The optimized Pt/Hβ-2 with hollow structure catalyst displayed the remarkable catalytic performance with the naphthalene conversion of 94.2 % and the decalin yield of 81.4 % at 220 °C, which was superior to the reaction performance of the catalysts reported in the literature under similar reaction condition. Besides, Pt/Hβ-2 presents higher turnover frequency (25.4 h−1) and reaction rate constant (9.9 × 10-3 min−1), which is because of the relatively low activation energy (30.86 kJ mol−1) for the naphthalene hydrogenation.