Studies on mono bimetallic and nano catalysts of nickel palladium and platinum metals and their applications in selective hydrogenation of acetylenic compounds and nitroaromatics of industrial relevance

Abstract

Catalysis has been playing a major role for last few decades due to its wide range applications in various fields such as fuel cell as renewable source of energy, abatement of air pollution, waste water treatment, environmental protection by developing green processes. In particular, due to increasing awareness of environmental issues, chemical industries look for the cleaner, safer, environmentally acceptable alternative and sustainable processes. Chemical processes should have minimum waste generation, improved product quality and cost effectiveness. Traditionally, for manufacturing fine chemicals the synthetic organic chemists used the classical ‘stoichiometric’ routes, which generate large amount of organic or inorganic wastes in the range of 1-100 kg byproduct formed per kg of product, which gives serious impact on environment and hence on human life. Some of the well known examples of such processes are oxidations with permanganate and chromium compounds, reductions with metal acids and metal hydrides, halogenations, alkylation, nitration etc. These processes are now being replaced by catalytic routes and among these processes, catalytic hydrogenation reactions of various organic functional groups is one of the core technologies widely used in chemical industries. Although hydrogenation is supposed to be a well developed subjected area, there is a great deal that can be still done for fundamental understanding particularly, in designing new catalysts and routes for selective hydrogenation reactions of industrial relevance [1]. For this purpose, we undertook a detailed study on the preparation and characterization of mono-, bimetallic and nanocatalysts using nickel, palladium and platinum metals. These catalysts were evaluated for their activities for the selective hydrogenation of 2-butyne- 1,4-diol to 2-butene-1,4-diol and butane-1,4-diols, phenylacetylene to styrene, nitrobenzene to p-aminophenol, m-chloronitrobenzene to m chloroaniline.