Nickel Nanoparticles Encapsulated in Carbon Nanotubes as an Efficient and Robust Catalyst for Hydrogenation of Nitroarenes

Catalytic hydrogenation of nitroarenes is an efficient and commonly used route for preparing aromatic amines. The cost-effective metallic Ni catalyst prefers to be used for its superior hydrogenation activity, but they generally are not stable enough and usually show poor reusability. In this work, carbon nanotube encapsulating metallic Ni catalysts were prepared by simple ball milling and calcining the mixture of poss-octaphenyl and nickel (II) acetate tetrahydrate. The as-prepared metallic nickel encapsulated catalyst Ni@CNT-800 exhibited excellent stability in the hydrogenation reaction, no any activity decrease was observed after ten runs whether at high conversion or low conversion. [GRAPHICS] .