New procedure for the preparation of nanostructured metal catalysts

Nanostructured metal catalysts have attracted a deep interest because they allow a great improvement of the catalytic performances with respect to commercial systems. As a consequence, different synthetic methods have been reported for their preparation, but all these processes present several drawbacks that limit their application on industrial scale. Now we have patented a simple, cheap and reproducible method for the large scale preparation of nanosized metal catalysts. All these catalysts were synthesized according to a standard procedure under nitrogen pressure. The obtained nanocatalysts were successively characterized by TEM and SEM, elemental analysis and FT-IR spectroscopy. This method has been successfully adopted for the preparation of gold, palladium, rhodium, platinum and ruthenium based nanocatalysts. All the synthesized catalysts present good characteristics in terms of metal particles average diameter and very narrow size distribution. This process enables to reach a good control of the metal particles dimension and morphology with an absolute reproducibility. The obtained nanostrucured catalysts result particularly efficient in terms of activity and selectivity in different chemoselective catalytic reactions, such as the hydrogenations of benzene to cyclohexene, of phenol to cyclohexanone and of benzaldehyde to benzyl alcohol.