Aromatic compounds are ubiquitously present in various fields, such as pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, liquid crystals, dyes, polymers, and so on. Recently, as one of the environmentally-friendly synthetic methods of various aromatic compounds, acceptorless dehydrogenative aromatization from non-aromatic compounds like cyclohexanones with the formation of H2 has attracted attention, but the need for expensive and rare precious metal catalysts such as palladium has been problematic to date. A research team focuses on nickel, a congener of palladium, as the promising non-precious inexpensive metal catalyst, although there is no report on nickel-catalyzed dehydrogenative aromatization without photoirradiation even using oxidants probably because of the difficulty in β-hydride elimination step in the case of frequently used nickel complex catalysts.
Here, the team overcame the bottleneck by utilizing the unique concerted catalysis of a ceria-supported nickel nanoparticle catalyst with multiple active sites, leading to unprecedented non-precious-metal-catalyzed acceptorless dehydrogenative aromatization of various cyclohexanone derivatives without any additives. This environmentally-friendly reaction achieves the simultaneous production of useful aromatic compounds and H2 using non-precious metal catalysts, which is expected to contribute to the sustainable world.
Papers
Journal: Nature Communications
Title: Ni-catalysed acceptorless dehydrogenative aromatisation of cyclohexanones enabled by concerted catalysis specific to supported nanoparticles
Authors: Takehiro Matsuyama, Takafumi Yatabe*, Tomohiro Yabe, Kazuya Yamaguchi*
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56361-4