Nitrogen-doped carbon anchored ruthenium nanoparticles for biofuel upgrade

The development of efficient catalysts is of great significance for the hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) of renewable biomass into value-added biofuel and chemicals to mitigate the environmental and energy menace. Herein, we report a sustainable strategy to fabricate ruthenium nanoparticles (NPs) anchored on defective nitrogen-doped carbon (Ru@NC) via a facile pyrolysis of a mixture of ruthenium trichloride and urea with carbon support. The highly distributed Ru NPs, constituted by N-enriched graphene shells, have been established as an excellent catalyst for the selective HDO of lignin- and furan- derivatives toward biofuel upgrade. Impressively, Ru@NC exhibits enhanced catalytic performance to commercial Ru/C, which could be attributed to the presence of the ensemble effects resulting from defective graphene sheet coverage on the Ru surface. Notably, the prepared catalyst was not affected after five successive reaction cycles, demonstrating superior stability and reproducibility. We envision that this work may pave the way for the development of highly efficient novel metal catalysts for heterogeneous catalytic HDO reactions in sustainable energy conversion.