Highly active catalysts for manufacturing bulk and fine chemicals can be made by simply grinding metal acetate salts with pre-formed supports.
Heterogeneous catalysis is a key chemical manufacturing process and lies at the heart of green chemical processes. The use of catalysts can lead to greener reactions when compared to alternative routes. But many routes for making catalysts use halides as a starting point and the halides are difficult to remove from the final material.
UK scientists have prepared supported gold, palladium and gold-palladium catalysts by mixing the metal acetate precursors. The simple, reproducible and scalable preparation method ensures the catalysts prepared are halide free. They found that the removal of the halide from the preparation step and therefore from the final catalyst leads to a significant enhancement in performance compared to previously reported catalysts.
Link to journal article
Physical mixing of metal acetates: a simple, scalable method to produce active chloride-free bimetallic catalysts
S A Kondrat et al
Chem. Sci., 2012, DOI: 10.1039/c2sc20450a
