Hydrogenation and Hydrogenolysis of Cyclopropane

The difference between cyclopropane and alkenes on the one hand and alkanes on the other is nowhere more clearly seen than in the kinetics of their reactions with hydrogen and in the relative activities of metals for those reactions. The ranking of metals activities for cyclopropane hydrogenation, namely, 

Little work has been reported on the use of bimetallic catalysts.Addition of copper to nickel as powder lowered the overall rate, without major change to the propane selectivity. Activation energies varied irrationally between 40 and 93 kJmol-  

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