Platinum Metals Review - Volume 13, Issue 4, 1969

Increasing industrial uses of platinum and its associated metals – palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium – have occasionally given rise to doubts as to the future availability of adequate supplies. This has sometimes discouraged research workers from considering the advantages of these metals in their search for new routes or for new products in the chemical and allied industries. This paper, presented at the Symposium on the Platinum Group Metals organised by the American Chemical Society during its meeting in New York in September, outlines the very substantial productive resources now associated with these metals and relates them to the trends in their applications in industry.

By making more efficient use of the platinum and by extending the reaction zone into the catalyst support, a fuel cell electrode has been developed to give excellent current output with extremely low platinum loadings.

Until the discovery of the Wacker reaction – the palladium-catalysed oxidation of ethylene to acetaldehyde – some ten years ago, the only application of palladium in organic synthesis was as a hydrogenation catalyst. In more recent years a number of new reactions have been found to be catalysed solely by palladium and its compounds, especially interesting reactions being those in which new carbon to carbon bonds are formed by the insertion of carbon monoxide into unsaturated molecules.

Ammines not previously described, and simple routes to others which have earlier been difficult to prepare, have been discovered as a result of the isolation of the bivalent ruthenium ammine hexammineruthenium(II) chloride and a study of its reactions. Certain of these compounds could have commercial significance, for example in electrodeposition or in the production of supported catalysts.