Synthesis of palladium-coated magnetic nanoparticle and its application in Heck reaction

In this paper, we synthesized the new palladium catalyst based on magnetic nanoparticles by the “bottom-up” approach, and then its catalytic behavior in the cross coupling of acrylic acid with iodobenzene was investigated. When compared with the traditional palladium catalysts supported on carbon or the others, such catalyst has a good performance in the first run (i.e. TOF of 3749 h−1 for NaOAc base). However, the activity in re-use is poor and especially influenced by the base in the reaction. The results of palladium leaching analysis and TEM image indicate that one of the causes for the above activity drop is the leaching of Pd nanoparticle (or palladium ion) from the surface of magnetic nanoparticle into the solution. Finally, the reaction of styrene with iodobenzene (or bromobenzene) was also employed to investigate its catalytic behavior.