Cu active centers anchored on Ce-MOFs as an efficient heterogenous catalyst for the selective oxidation of alcohols to acids

In recent years, the catalytic oxidation of cheap and easily available alcohols to value-added carboxylic acids has attracted considerable interest. In this work, a post-synthetic modification strategy was employed to anchor Cu species to coordinate with the -NH₂ in UiO-66-NH₂(Ce), obtaining the catalyst Cu-UiO-66-NH₂(Ce). The catalyst exhibited excellent performance for the direct oxidation of alcohols to carboxylic acids under mild reaction conditions without extra bases. The synthesized materials were characterized by XRD, SEM, XPS, BET, FT-IR, Raman and ICP-OES, the results show that Cu species were successfully anchored onto UiO-66-NH₂(Ce) by the coordination with N atoms. Moreover, the coordination between Cu ions and N atoms as well as the unique structure of UiO-66-NH₂(Ce) could provide uniformly catalytic active centers on heterogeneous catalyst, which are essential for the high catalytic performance of the catalyst. Furthermore, the recyclability of the catalyst was also investigated, which can be recovered and recycled for 10 times without significant loss of catalytic activity. This work provides an efficient and cost-effective approach to the direct oxidation of alcohols to carboxylic acids.