A sulfur-tolerant phosphorus doped Pd/C catalyst for hydrogenation of 4-nitrothioanisole

[Display omitted] •The P doping Pd/C as a new sulfur resistant hydrogenation catalyst was reported.•This catalyst was obtained by simply phosphating Pd/C with triphenylphosphine.•The P doping can resist the adsorption of sulfur-containing substances.•This catalyst showed high activity and stability in the reaction. In this paper, we report a new type of sulfur resistant hydrogenation catalyst, which was obtained by simply phosphating commercial Pd/C catalyst with triphenylphosphine under H2 atmosphere at 600 °C. At this temperature, no palladium phosphides formed in XRD patterns due to the low synthetic temperature. Element analysis, N2 adsorption-desorption and ICP characterizations show that only a small amount of P has been introduced into Pd, so the phosphorus doping does not change the pore size and surface area of pristine Pd/C. XPS characterization shows that P doping can effectively prevent the substrate adsorption on Pd surface, which relieves the sulfurization rate of Pd. Hence, the phosphorus doping catalyst can fully catalyze the 4-nitrothioanisole to 4-aminothioanisole and exhibits higher activity than Pd/C, which only has 70.9 % conversion. Moreover, the phosphorus doped Pd/C catalyst has better stability than Pd/C and its activity is almost unchanged during the recycle.