Palladium supported on reduced graphene oxide as a high-performance catalyst for the dehydrogenation of dodecahydro-N-ethylcarbazole

Liquid organic hydrogen carrier technology has been considered the most promising scheme of alternative to liquid fossil fuels . However, incomplete dehydrogenation has been a bottleneck in the development, as the dehydrogenation catalysts do not have satisfactory catalytic properties . Here we report on a catalyst of Pd supported on reduced graphene oxide (rGO) prepared by ethylene glycol with excellent catalytic performance for the dehydrogenation of dodecahydro- N -ethylcarbazole (12H-NECZ). The Pd/rGO -EG catalyst exhibits a dramatically enhanced specific activity (up to 14.4 times) and uses half the amount of noble metals in contrast to the state-of-the-art commercial Pd/Al 2 O 3 dehydrogenation catalyst. At 433, 443 and 453 K, amounts of dehydrogenation of 5.27, 5.49 and 5.78 wt%, respectively, were achieved using a 2.5 wt% Pd/rGO -EG catalyst. The dehydrogenation performance of Pd/rGO reduced by different reducing agents was irregular. The catalyst characterization of Pd/rGO -EG shows that Pd is uniformly distributed on the monolayer rGO, mainly in the form of single crystal , with the highest activity Pd (111) surface. A more accurate kinetic calculation was performed to obtain the rate constant of each elementary reaction of the dehydrogenation reaction.