A highly accessible and robust carbon-coated cobalt nanoparticle catalyst for furfural hydrogenative valorization at mild reaction

The hydrogenative upgrading of furfural into valuable chemical intermediates has currently caught intensive research interest, with robust and efficient catalysts that can operate under mild reaction conditions remaining challenging. In this study, we presented a high-performance carbon-coated cobalt catalyst (Co@C) through pyrolysis of sheet-like Co-MOF. The optimized Co@C-T550 exhibited an intriguing furfural conversion rate under a very mild reaction condition of 80 °C and 1 MPa. The catalyst's enhanced activity at low-temperature effectively suppressed side reactions, resulting in an excellent furfuryl alcohol productivity of 4.8 gFOL·gCo−1·h−1, surpassing most cobalt-based catalysts reported in recent literature. Furthermore, the high performance of Co@C-T550 can be sustained with slight decay even after undergoing 10 recycling runs, underscoring the reliable stability of the catalyst. Structure characterizations have revealed that this novel Co@C-T550 had highly dispersed cobalt nanoparticles with a microporous carbon coating, affording a high number of metallic cobalt sites with an excellent ability to resist cobalt sintering/leaching and re-oxidation. The insights gained from this study provide a solid foundation for the rational design of advanced carbon-coated cobalt catalysts for low-temperature hydrogenative biomass upgrading.