Application of loaded nickel catalyst

I believe that with the popularization of chemistry, more and more people will understand the truth that it is due to the rapid development of chemical industry technology that we see more and more high-quality skin care products, and people no longer believe in such ignorant and uninteresting advertisements as "natural, no additives" and "I just hate chemistry".

The main character I will introduce to you today is squalane, which is a hydrocarbon composed of six isoprene double bonds and belongs to the terpenoid structure. And its skin care effects are mainly as follows.

1. Strengthening the repair of the epidermis, effectively forming a natural protective film and helping the balance between skin and sebum.

2. Squalane is the closest lipid to human sebum, with strong affinity, and can be integrated with human's own sebaceous membrane, forming a natural barrier on the skin surface.

3. Squalane can also inhibit the peroxidation of skin lipids, effectively penetrate into the skin and promote the proliferation of skin basal cells, which has obvious physiological effects on delaying skin aging and improving and eliminating melasma.

4. Squalane can also make the skin pores open, promote blood microcirculation, enhance cell metabolism, and help repair broken cells.

So, how does something so good come about?

Right, literally we guessed its original source: it is a refined product taken from the livers of large sharks in deep sea environments, basically all sharks contain squalane. You know, it takes 3000 sharks to produce 1 ton of squalane, and the annual cosmetic demand for squalane is 2000 tons, so if it all came from sharks, then 6 million sharks would have to be killed every year, what a staggering and cruel number!

And happily, companies like HABA have switched to vegetable sources for their second generation products after launching the first generation of sharkane refined beauty oil from animal sources.

After analyzing the chemical structure of squalane, we happily found that there will be relatively high content of squalene present in a few vegetable oils such as olive oil and rice bran oil, and squalene can be obtained through catalytic hydrogenation.

It is through the very good hydrogenation effect of loaded nickel that plant-derived squalene can be catalytically hydrogenated to produce squalane, thus reducing shark hunting. Going back to HABA, although the main driver for switching to plant-derived squalane may be profit (after all, animal-derived is more costly), such a change does contribute to the protection of sharks.

That other credit goes to the nickel-loaded catalyst. Nickel-loaded catalysts can reduce the iodine value of raw materials from over 200 to within 2 at 140°C. And when the temperature is raised to 160°C, the reaction time and catalyst usage are reduced and the iodine value can be even lowered to within 1. This provides a technical guarantee for the industrial catalytic hydrogenation production of squalane. This is because our nickel-loaded catalysts have very good catalytic hydrogenation activity for long chain molecules, so they are also suitable for the hydrogenation of many polymers.