In recent years, due to the increasingly serious global environmental problems, green chemistry has become an important topic in the field of chemistry. For catalytic disciplines, new environmentally friendly catalytic materials and new technologies should be continuously developed, new synthetic routes should be explored, raw material consumption should be reduced as much as possible, every step in the preparation process from raw materials to product use should be reduced, and “three wastes” emissions should also be reduced to protect the environment. Boron is a kind of widely used chemical raw material, which is abundant in nature and active in nature. Boron has a wide variety of compounds, some of which can be used as catalysts, such as boric acid. Catalytic hydrogenation has great industrial application value. Amorphous catalysts doped with boron in other metals have remarkable catalytic effects in catalytic hydrogenation and become a research hotspot in chemical catalysis.

Below are some types of the boron catalyst:

• Boric acid:Boric acid is actually B₂O₃·3H₂O. Boron oxide hydrate is a white powder crystal or three beveled scaly shiny crystals with a soapy feel and a specific gravity of 1.435 (15 °C). Boric acid is widely used in industry, agriculture, national defense and modern science and technology. At the same time, boric acid is also a kind of efficient catalyst, which is cheap, easy to get, soluble in water, less corrosive to equipment and environmentally friendly. Due to these advantages, boric acid has been used as a catalyst for many types of organic reactions, such as Biginelli reaction, Michael reaction, transesterification reaction, synthetic amide, synthetic ester, Friedel-Craft reaction and other condensation reactions.

Figure 1. Boric acid

• Amorphous boron alloy catalyst:The amorphous catalyst is a kind of new material with long range disordered and short range ordered structure. These new environmentally friendly catalysts are widely used in hydrogenation. In recent years, more studies have been conducted on amorphous catalysts doped with Ni (Co)-B or Mn, W and other metals. It has high activity and good selectivity in catalytic hydrogenation of aromatic aldehydes. At the same time, the catalyst can also be used for deoxidation reaction. Under suitable conditions, the conversion and selectivity of hydrodeoxygenation can reach 100 %.
• Boron-containing water cracking catalyst:The innovation of catalytic materials is one of the keys for the development of hydrolysis. In the past 10 years, the research and development of non-noble metal hydrolysis catalysts have made a series of important progress. Mo-S and Mo-B are the classical hydrolysis catalysts, among which MoB₂ containing borene subunit structure shows the best catalytic performance. The MoB₂ material has excellent electron conduction ability, which is equivalent to the precious metal Pt. The density and activity of the active site of hydrogen evolution on the theoretical model of MoB₂ are even higher than that on the Pt (111) surface, making it an ideal electrocatalyst.