New nanostructured metal catalysts for selective hydrogenations

Nanostructured metal catalysts have attracted an increasing interest because their employment may afford a great improvement of the catalytic performances. Now we have patented a simple, cheap and reproducible process for the large scale preparation of nanosized metal catalysts. In particular, these nanostrucured catalysts based on ruthenium result very efficient in terms of activity and selectivity in many chemoselective catalytic reactions, such as the hydrogenations of benzene to cyclohexene as well as of phenol to cyclohexanone. On the other hand, our palladium nanocatalysts were tested in the hydrogenation of cyclohexene as well as of benzaldehyde to benzyl alcohol. Higher performances, in terms of both activity and selectivity, of our systems respect to commercial ones have been always ascertained.