Other Reactions Catalysed by Gold

This final section gathers together a number of unrelated facets of the behaviour and potential of highly dispersed gold that are not conveniently located elsewhere in this book. They share no common features, but are briefly described here to stimulate possible future areas for development. 

In a quite different field, colloidal gold formed by reduction with citrate ion markedly improved the activity of silver chloride electrodes for the 

We have normally declined to consider the consequences of combining gold with a catalytically active element of Group 10 where the sole function of the gold is to dilute the more active component a great deal could be written on such systems, but, since gold has no activity of its own in these cases, it seemed inappropriate to consider them in this book. However, to indicate how the dilution effect operates, we have selected one system of great technical importance where application of the techniques of surface science have revealed exactly what happens. 

We noted in Chapter 7 the requirement of the chemical industry for large quantities of pure hydrogen for processes such as ammonia synthesis and fat hardening, and that the major route followed is the steam-reforming of alkanes, e.g. 

Finally, gold-plated copper turnings catalysed the fluorination of aromatic hydrocarbons at 550K 20 gold has also been the means of making carbon nanotubes from ethyne (5% Au/SiC -A Cfy 823 K)21 and chloromethylsilanes.22 

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It merely remains to note very briefly a number of other reactions catalysed by gold that produce hydrogen they mainly derive from the older literature. 

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