Metal-free carbon materials have attracted growing attention in terms of green and sustainable catalysis processes that could avoid potential metal leaching but usually suffered from inferior activity to metal-loaded counterparts. In this work, we constructed an efficient carbon catalyst via hydrothermal carbonization of biomass-derived feedstock glucose under relatively low temperature (180 °C). The resultant carbon material possessing abundant surface oxygen species effectively catalyzed the benzene hydroxylation with dioxygen (O₂), a desirable but very difficult alternative process for producing the important bulk chemical phenol. A considerably high phenol yield of 13.1% was achieved within 4 h, a reaction time much shorter than all the previous metal-free catalysts and even shorter than most efficient metal-based catalysts. The fast reaction is determined by the formation of small-sized primary carbon particles with the abundant surface oxygen species, for which the adsorption enhancing effect in the media of this heterogeneous process was experimentally evidenced.

无金属碳材料在绿色和可持续催化过程方面引起了越来越多的关注，这些过程可以避免潜在的金属浸出，但通常与负载金属的对应物相比活性较差。在这项工作中，我们通过在相对较低的温度（180°C）下对生物质衍生的原料葡萄糖进行水热碳化，构建了一种高效的碳催化剂。所得的具有丰富表面氧物种的碳材料有效地催化苯与双氧 (O ₂)，这是一种生产重要的大宗化学苯酚的理想但非常困难的替代方法。在 4 小时内实现了 13.1% 的相当高的苯酚产率，反应时间比以前所有的无金属催化剂短得多，甚至比最有效的金属基催化剂还要短。快速反应是由形成具有丰富表面氧物质的小尺寸初级碳颗粒决定的，实验证明了这种非均相过程介质中的吸附增强作用。