Hydrogenation of 1,3-butadiene and of crotonaldehyde over highly dispersed Au catalysts

When Au is deposited as nano-particles on select metal oxides, it exhibits surprisingly high catalytic activity for many oxidation reactions. Therefore, there is also the possibility to improve the activities of An catalysts for hydrogenation using the appropriate preparation methods like the gas-phase grafting method (GG) and the deposition precipitation method (DP). In this work, we investigated the hydrogenation of 1,3-butadiene and of crotonaldehyde over Au catalysts prepared by GG and DP and discussed the structure sensitivity of these reactions. From these experiments, it was found that the catalytic activities for the hydrogenation of 1,3-butadiene over An catalysts was almost structure insensitive in terms of the size effect of Au particles and the influence of metal oxides supports and the crotonaldehyde hydrogenation over An catalysts was slightly sensitive to the selection of the support in the view point of the product selectivity. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.