Tannic Acid: A green and efficient stabilizer of Au, Ag, Cu and Pd nanoparticles for the 4-Nitrophenol Reduction, Suzuki–Miyaura coupling reactions and click reactions in aqueous solution

Abstract

Due to the good electrical, optical, magnetic, catalytic properties, transition metal nanoparticles (TMNPs) have been becoming more and more interesting in the fileds of environment, material, biomedicine, catalysis, and so on. Here, tannic acid (TA) is used as a green and efficient stabilizer to fabricate all kinds of TMNPs including AuNPs, AgNPs, CuNPs and PdNPs. These TMNPs possess small sizes ranging from 1 nm to 6 nm, which is conducive to several catalytic reactions in aqueous solution, such as 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) reduction, CuAAC reactions and Suzuki–Miyaura coupling reactions. AuNPs and PdNPs are found to have distinctly higher catalytic activities than AgNPs and CuNPs in the 4-NP reduction process. Especially, PdNPs show the highest catalytic activities with TOF up to 7200 h−1 in the 4-NP reduction. Furthermore, PdNPs also exhibit satisfying catalytic performance in the Suzuki–Miyaura coupling process, and CuNPs are catalytically active in the copper-catalyzed azide alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) reactions. The applicability and generality of PdNPs and CuNPs are respectively confirmed via the reaction between different substrates in the Suzuki–Miyaura coupling reactions and the CuAAC reactions. This work present a simple, fast, green and efficient strategy to synthesize TMNPs for multiple catalysis.