The drive to develop increasingly active and selective heterogeneous catalysts
continues with considerable vigour. In the case of large and medium scale
production processes the stimulation remains the need to increase profitability and
to improve process environmental acceptability. In the speciality, fine chemicals
and pharmaceuticals businesses the drivers are the same, but include also the need
to develop more efficient and faster methods for synthesising potential new products.
This is particularly the case in the pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals areas where
the high throughput synthesis and screening of potentially active compounds has
become an economic imperative.
Traditionally heterogeneous catalysts have been based primarily on inorganic
oxide materials, and attempts to construct molecularly well-defined metal complex
centres have been fewer in number. In contrast the much less used polymer-based
heterogeneous catalysts have focussed more on immobilising well-defined catalytic
entities. Interestingly these two areas are now moving closer towards each other,
such that a healthy overlap has started to develop. This trend seems set to continue
and can only benefit the whole heterogeneous catalysis field.