Study of Deactivation in Suzuki Reaction of Polymer-Stabilized Pd Nanocatalysts

This work is addressed to the phenomenon of catalyst deactivation taking place during the repeated uses in the reaction of Suzuki-Miyaura (S-M) cross-coupling, which is widely applied in industry for C-C bond formation. Ligandless catalysts based on Pd(0) NPs supported on hyper-cross-linked polystyrene (HPS) of two types (non-functionalized and bearing tertiary amino groups) were studied in a model S-M reaction between 4-bromoanisole and phenylboronic acid. Synthesized catalysts were shown to be highly active under mild reaction conditions. HPS allows stabilization of Pd(0) NPs and prevents their agglomeration and detectable Pd leaching. However, the loss of catalytic activity was observed during recycling. The deactivation issue was assigned to the hydrophobic nature of non-functionalized HPS, which allowed a strong adsorption of cross-coupling product during the catalyst separation procedure. A thorough washing of Pd/HPS catalyst by hydrophobic solvent was found to improve to the big extent the observed catalytic activity, while the replacement of non-functionalized HPS by a one containing amino groups increased the catalyst stability at the expense of their activity.