Highly dispersed silica-supported nanocopper as an efficient heterogeneous catalyst: application in the synthesis of 1,2,3-triazoles and thioethers

In this paper, we report the synthesis of amine modified SiNPs (silica nanoparticles) by a sol-gel method and the role of synthesized SiO2 as a solid support for the nanocatalyst CuNPs (copper nanoparticles). The nanocatalyst is characterized by XRD, HRTEM, BET, AFM, SEM, EDX, UV-vis, FT-IR and TGA techniques. The Cu/SiO2 (catalyst A) serves as an efficient heterogeneous nanocatalyst exhibiting high catalytic activity for the synthesis of a series of 1,4-disubstituted-1,2,3-triazoles and thioethers. The catalyst A can be recycled and reused several times without any significant loss of catalytic activity as proved by XRD and HRTEM techniques.