Nickel-Aluminum CatalystInfo Needed

[P-man]

I've been doing more research into catalysts and fell on a nickel-aluminum alloy, mostly nickel. Does anyone know anything about these types of catalysts?

 

[movies]

You mean like Raney Nickel? That's an Al/Ni alloy. It's often used for reductive removal of sulfur atoms from organic compounds.

 

[The P-manator]

Hey it's me, P-man, but I just had to re-register under a new name. Anyways, That's exactly the alloy I was looking at. What do you know about it?

 

[movies]

I've used it a few times in the lab. What do you want to know?

 

[The P-manator]

Properties, reactivity with hydrogen, and weight etc.

 

[movies]

You usually buy it as a slurry in water that is 50/50 wt% RaNi. To get the maxium activity out of it you should wash and decant with absolute ethanol a few times to remove as much water as possible. Ethanol (sometimes methanol) is the typical solvent for these reaction.

It's a competent reductant for reducing carbon sulfur bonds on it's own. It can also reduce alkenes to alkanes if you use stoichiometric amounts, but for that purpose people often use a catalytic amount of RaNi and a balloon of hydrogen gas. The reduction of alkenes is slow relative to the reduction of carbon-sulfur bonds and sometimes you can remove sulfur in the presence of alkenes.

There are some other funky reactions that RaNi will do as well. There is at least one example of enantioselective carbonyl reduction with tartaric acid as a ligand. That's a rare thing for a reagent that seems to be a heterogeneous catalyst. I'm not familiar with speculations about the mechanism of the enantioselective reaction though.

Does that help?

 

[The P-manator]

How much is it currently?

 

[movies]

To buy? My Aldrich catalog says around $60 for 100 g. There are a couple of variants available which have somewhat different levels of reactivity, but they all cost roughly the same amount.

 

[The P-manator]

Thanks a lot for all the help.