Precious metal nanoparticles (NPs) are a kind of promising hydrogenation catalyst. However, the particle size,
stabilization and uniform dispersion of precious metal NPs is always a great challenge. Herein, Pt NPs were
synthesized with controlled particle size and uniformly confined within the pores of Fe-BDC MOFs via an ecofriendly
polyol reduction method and evaluated for selective hydrogenation of 4-Nitrophenols (4-NiPh) to 4-Aminophenols
(4-AmPh). Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOF), a promising host material, provide a large surface area
and pore volumes for evenly accommodating the Pt NPs with controlled particle size. The as-prepared Pt/Fe-BDC
catalyst exhibited higher catalytic hydrogenation activity under mild conditions. Interestingly, the Pt/Fe-BDC
catalyst exhibited superior catalytic activity with low Pt loading (0.47%) than that of the Pt/Fe3O4 catalyst. A
series of bulk and surface structural characterizations including XRD, FTIR, TEM, XPS and CO-FTIR, etc., were
conducted to examine the outstanding performance of the Pt/Fe-BDC catalyst. The outstanding catalytic hydrogenation
performance of Pt/Fe-BDC catalyst was attributed to the large surface area, pore volume and additional
functional groups of MOFs. The large surface area and pore volume of Fe-BDC MOFs control the Pt particle size
(1.9 nm), and high uniform dispersion (59%) due to confinement effect, while the presence of additional functional
groups in Fe-BDC MOFs synergistically interacts with Pt species to generate more exposed surface active
metallic Pt0.