Phase-control synthesis and catalytic property of nickel phosphide nanospheres

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RESEARCH PAPER

Phase-control synthesis and catalytic property of nickel phosphide nanospheres Tao Geng & Hongyan Wang & Hao Wu & Shuangbin Zhang

Received: 23 February 2020 / Accepted: 20 July 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract In this article, a mild hydrothermal route was developed to synthesize nickel phosphide nanostructures, using nickel chloride, sodium hypophosphite, and white phosphorus (WP) as reactants at 170 °C. The results indicated that the controllable phase of the prepared nickel phosphide nanostructures was highly dependent on the amount of sodium hypophosphite, WP, and reaction time. We also discovered that different phase nickel phosphide nanostructures have excellent catalytic properties for the reduction of 4-nitrophenol (4NP) to 4-aminophenol (4-AP) in NaBH4. Simultaneously, similar aromatic nitro compounds 2-nitrophenol (2NP) and 4-nitroaniline (4-NA) were further discussed. The experimental results demonstrated that the pure Ni2P phase has a better catalytic reduction of 4-NP than the pure Ni12P5 phase.

Keywords Phase-controlled synthesis . Nickel phosphide . White phosphorus . Catalytic properties . 4Nitrophenol . Nanostructured catalysts

T. Geng (*) : H. Wang : H. Wu : S. Zhang School of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, Suzhou University, 49 Bianhe Road, Suzhou 234000, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] T. Geng : H. Wang Key Laboratory of Spin Electron and Nanomaterials of Anhui Higher Education Institutes, Suzhou University, Suzhou 234000, People’s Republic of China

Introduction In the last few decades, transitional metal phosphides, including their compositions, structures, morphology, sizes, and phases, have been attracting the deep and extensive research interest of scientific researchers owing to their many interesting special properties and potential applications in many fields, for example, methanol oxidation (Zhu et al. 2015), CO2 reduction (Ji et al. 2020), storage of energy, and electronic devices, such as Li-ion batteries and supercapacitors (Lu et al. 2012; Wang et al. 2015; Wu et al. 2016a, 2016b; Wang et al. 2019). Furthermore, nickel phosphides are very important and especially demonstrate in the catalytic reduction field, for example, the degradation of small organic molecules, catalytic hydrogenation of aromatic nitrobenzene compounds, and hydrogen evolution reaction (Wu et al. 2016a, 2016b; Lu et al. 2016; Jiang et al. 2014a, 2014b; Zhang et al. 2018; Tian et al. 2017; Ehsan and Nafiseh 2019). Generally, the performance of phosphides of nickel, as a member of transitional metal phosphides, is dearly reliant on their phase and size. Due to the ratio of Ni/P ≥ 1, nickel phosphides have better stability compared with Ni/P < 1. They have attracted considerable interests in the field of nanomaterials (Abu and Smith 2007; Oyama 2003). Until now, Ni2P nanostructures synthesis routes have been reported in numerous previous works in the literature, including precursor thermolysis, reduction of metal phosphates, and employment of organic reagents like tri