ABSTRACT
Catalytic hydrogenation is certainly the most widely applicable method for the reduction of organic compounds and belongs to the most important transformations in the chemical industry. There is no attempt to try to review the entire field since this is a very large endeavor and has been, to a certain extent, done elsewhere, in particular for noble metals [1-6]. Instead, I will highlight some scientific developments and industrial applications of heterogeneous hydrogenation catalysts and set the motif for the following chapters, which focus on the use of nano materials of cheap and abundant transition metals. This is a rather new area of research, established to circumvent some of the current limitations with their noble metal catalysts counterparts-namely, low abundance, high cost, and, in some cases, toxicity.
