Transforming Nano Metal Nonselective Particulates into Chemoselective Catalysts for Hydrogenation of Substituted Nitrobenzenes

By P. Serna, Avelino Corma. 2015

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The hydrogenation of nitro compounds is an industrial process that has experienced a renovated interest in the last 10 years due to the discovery of highly selective and environmentally friendly solid catalysts. Particularly, the performance of chemoselective reactions in the presence of very sensitive groups such as double and triple CC bonds, with H2 as reductant and no soluble additives needed, had been elusive for decades. The discovery that gold nanoparticles on solid supports could carry out such a reaction very selectively invigorated this area of research and claimed gold as an outstanding catalyst beyond oxidation processes. Subsequent work, devoted to understand how gold catalysts operate, established a strong basis for the design of more efficient materials and the development of new routes for the synthesis of nitro derivatives. Here, we present three generations of materials that allowed improving the performance of the original gold catalysts. The relatively low activity of the initial Au/Ti...

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Organic Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec2ed82ef26eb0278d46da56f2d3dadaae35c83a