this was accomplished by impregnation of alumina to incipient wetness with a solution of nickel nitrate and urea.

careful heating avoided solvent evaporation and hydrolyzed the urea to provide the base needed to precipitate nickel hydroxide inside the pores. after drying and reduction NI/AL203 catalyst was produced having very small nickel cystallites uniformly distributed throughout the alumina. some difficulties have been observed in the preparation of supported ruthenium catalysts by incipient wetness using ruthenium chloride solutions with a silica support. the usual procedure of air calcination followed by reduction in hydrogen at 450-500 celcius gave a catalysts inferior to one which the dried material was reduced directly in hydrogen at 700 celcius. this direct reduction did not result in any metal sintering, even though the temperature was high. the high temperature was needed, though, to remove the chlorine impurities from the ruthenium surface. application of this same procedure to a ruthenium chloride supported on carbon resulted in considerable hydrogenation of the support. this could be minimized by first heating the supported salt in a stream og nitrogen followed by high temperature hydrogen reduction with short contact times. this modified procedure produced a particularly active Ru/C catalyst. a Ni/Si02 catalyst prepared by incipient wetness was shown to consist, intially, of the silica support filled with the nickel salt. on reduction the nickel particles coalesced to form large cystallites because of their weak interaction with the support. coprecipitated catalyst, however, were composed of layered silicate structures that were more difficult to reduce to metallic nickel. when reduction did take place, though, the reduced cystallites were fixed within the confines of the support so small metal particles with a narrow size range were produced. table 13.1 metal complexes commonly used to prepare supported catalyst by ion exchange.

cobalt nickel copper ruthenium rhodium palladium silver iridium platinum gold

ion exchange as discussed in chapter 9, the adsorption character af a support material is governed by the nature of its surface functionality. for oxides these are generally hydroxy groups and for carbon supports they are acidic functions such as phenols and carboxylic acids. depending on the acidity of these surface groups and the pH of the solution in which the support is suspended, the surface can be either positively or negatively charged as shown in Fig.9.4. the pH at which the net charge on the support is zero is referred to as the isoelectric point (IEP) of the material. when the surface is negative, cationic species are attracted to it and become adsorbed. a positive surface interacts with negative species. the common anionic and cationic complexes used in catalyst preparation are listed in table 13.1

for exchange on a support two conditions must be met : the pH of the impregnation solution must be either sufficiently high or low to provide the appropriate surface potential and the adsorbent must have the proper charge. the isoelectric points of a number of oxides are listed in table 9.1. along with the increase in the adsorption of negative ion results. incipient wetness