PREFACEThe hydrogen molecule is dissociatively chemisorbed with great facility by a number of metals within the Transition Series: elsewhere the process is more highly activated, but chemisorbed atoms once formed are stable. The contrast between hydrogen and the alkanes is very striking: the σ H H bond can sometimes be broken at temperatures close to 20 K, the activation energy being minimal, whereas with methane each σ C H bond is effectively shielded by the other hydrogen atoms, so that much higher temperatures are needed for its chemisorption by dissociation.The strengths of hydrogen-metal bonds at the surfaces of metals of Groups 8 to 10 are of similar order, but they tend to increase on moving towards the centre of each Transition Series. These trends are shown more distinctly by other molecules such as oxygen and nitrogen, where a clear parallelism with analogous bulk compounds is shown: but within the Transition Series stoichiometric hydrides are formed only by metals of Groups 3, 4 and 5. Because of commercial interest and experimental convenience, certain metals have commanded disproportionate attention: tungsten, platinum and nickel in the massive form and platinum also in the microscopic form. For these same reasons, other metals have escaped attention almost entirely (e.g. manganese and osmium).All the catalysed reactions to be considered in the following chapters involve hydrogen (or deuterium) as reactant or product, and a knowledge of its chemisorption, and of reaction between its isotopic and spin variants, will prove helpful in understanding its reaction with hydrocarbons. For this reason most emphasis will be placed on the interaction of hydrogen with metals of Groups 8 to 10.While the utility of hydrogen in catalysed reactions is due in part to its small size and easy migration, these features add greatly to the difficulty of describing 93 94 CHAPTER 3