Preparation and Catalytic Activity of Pd and Bimetallic Pd–Ni Nanowires

This article describes the preparation and catalytic property of Pd and Pd-Ni nanowires with network structure. A soft template with network structure formed by long-chain amidoamine derivative (C18AA) was essential to preparing Pd and Pd-Ni nanowires because of the preparation of only spherical nanoparticles using octadecylamine, which does not form a network structure as a soft template, instead of C18AA. Furthermore, this soft-template method demands a slow reduction rate for the metal ion, the same as the general preparation method for novel metal nanowires. The distinguishing features of the present method is that the nanowires are a few nanometers in diameter and there are no byproducts such as nanoparticles. In addition, the bimetallic Pd-Ni nanowires show very high catalytic activity for the hydrogenation of p-nitrophenol as compared to Pd nanowires, Pd nanoparticles, and Pd-Ni nanoparticles.