Ni-B/Mesoporous Graphitic Carbon Nitride Catalyst Boosts Natural Product Cis-pinane Via Catalytic Reduction of α-Pinene

Cis-pinane is an important chemical intermediate in the chemical industry, mainly originating from the selective hydrogenation product of α-pinene. However, the H2 molecules approach α-pinene in different directions to form different intermediates, resulting in low selectivity of cis-pinane. Therefore, designing new catalyst is supposed to be an efficient way to guide the orientation of products. Although many works have reported the new prepared catalysts can improve the selectivity of hydrogenated products, these works ignore the simplicity of the catalyst preparation process, especially in the carriers. In this work, the new high-efficiency and low-cost catalyst was prepared by introducing non-precious Ni-B reactive sites on a simple process-prepared carriers (Mesoporous graphite carbon nitride, MCN). After optimizing, the conversion and selectivity of α-pinene reached 98.9 and 99.9%. Combined with experimental characterization and density functional theory (DFT) calculation, these desiring results can be attributed to the synergy of Ni-B reactive sites and the large π system of MCN, which is beneficial to the absorption of reactants, and promote the production of target products (cis-pinane) follow a specific reaction route. This work demonstrates that the new prepared catalyst possessed excellent industrial potential to obtain natural product cis-pinane via catalytic reduction of α-pinene.