Highly selective and stable polybenzoxazine-based carbon nanosheet supported Pd catalyst for aerobic benzyl alcohol oxidation

Small Pd nanoparticles tend to aggregate during the thermal treatment or lose during the reaction process, which lead to the decrease in activity. To solve this problem, the 2D polybenzoxazine-based polymer nanosheets were selected as supports, to prepare carbon supported Pd nanoparticles by the idea of “pyrolysis embedding” in this paper. The polybenzoxazine-based carbon nanosheets supported Pd catalysts were characterized by XRD, FTIR, TEM, SEM, and XPS. The coordination interaction between nitrogen atoms and palladium ions is beneficial for stabilizing Pd nanoparticles. The Pd nanoparticles are uniformly dispersed over the carbon nanosheets, and the average size of the Pd nanoparticles is ~ 2.5 nm. The synthesized catalyst exhibited a remarkable TOF of 1928 h−1 with high selectivity to benzaldehyde of > 99% for the aerobic oxidation of benzyl alcohol in aqueous media and also presented good stability.