Hydrogenation

Hydrogenation is a chemical reaction that adds molecular hydrogen to a compound, typically in the presence of a catalyst such as nickel, palladium, or platinum, reducing double or triple bonds in the target molecule and converting unsaturated compounds into saturated ones. The French chemist Paul Sabatier, sometimes called the father of modern catalytic hydrogenation, developed much of the foundational chemistry and shared the 1912 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it; the German chemist Wilhelm Normann patented the hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils into solid fats in Germany and Britain between 1902 and 1903, a process that underlies the industrial manufacture of margarine. Later refinements included an elevated-pressure hydrogenation apparatus developed by Voorhees and Adams in 1922 and a finely powdered nickel catalyst developed by Murray Raney in 1924. Hydrogenation is now used throughout the food, petrochemical, and pharmaceutical industries, in both heterogeneous, industrially dominant forms and homogeneous forms used for finer synthetic chemistry.