Mesoporous palladium–copper ferrites as highly efficient and magnetically separable catalysts for Suzuki coupling reaction

Abstract Mesoporous Cu–Pd ferrites were prepared by using MCM-41 and SBA-15 mesoporous molecular sieves as hard templates and well characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), ICP-atomic emission spectroscopy, N 2 adsorption–desorption and X-ray photoelectric spectroscopy (XPS). Compared with samples prepared by the sol–gel auto-combustion methods, the as-prepared mesoporous ferrites have shown uniform pore size and much higher specific surface areas. The samples showed a remarkably high activity in connection with the Suzuki coupling reaction, especially Cu 0.99 Pd 0.01 Fe 2 O 4 prepared by using MCM-41 as template obtained an excellent TOF as high as 36.9 × 10 3  h −1 and no obvious decrease in the activity was observed after ten consecutive runs.