Selective hydrogenation of phenylacetylene on gold nanoparticles

This work investigates 2.5 – 30 nm gold nanoparticles immobilized on Al 2 O 3 . It shows that they possess high activity and stability in selective hydrogenation of phenylacetylene into styrene from a phenylacetylene-styrene mixture at 423 K. Strong dependences of the activity and selectivity of Au/ Al 2 O 3 on the gold size were revealed: as the size of supported gold nanoparticles was decreased from 30 to 2.5 nm, the TOF of phenylacetylene hydrogenation increased from 0.028 to 0.142 s −1 and the selectivity of styrene formation increased by an order of magnitude. The nature of the identified dependences is discussed in terms of “Geometric” and “Electronic” size-effect points.