The catalytic hydrogenation reactivity of aromatic nitro compounds over RANEY® Ni was substantially improved when a moderate amount of metal fluoride (NaF, KF, MgF 2 , and CaF 2 ) was added into the reaction system.Aromatic amines (ANs) are commercially important for the large scale production of many ne chemicals, such as dyes, herbicides, whiteners, pharmaceuticals, and agrochemicals. [1][2][3][4] Liquid-phase hydrogenation of nitro aromatic compounds (NBs) over metal catalysts is recognized as an efficient and environmentally friendly procedure to produce ANs as no other harmful effluents are produced except water. In the catalytic reaction, the catalyst plays a very important part. Catalysts based on noble and non-noble metals, such as Pt, 5-7 Pd, 8,9 Rh, 10-12 Au, 1-3,13 Ni, [14][15][16][17][18][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]19,20 have been widely studied. Even though the noble metal catalysts show a good catalytic performance under mild conditions, their rather rare resource and high cost limit practical applications. Actually, in industrial production, Ni is usually chosen as catalyst rather than noble metals for the hydrogenation of NBs owing to its abundant resources and low price. 14-18,21-28 Therefore, the utilization of Ni catalyst has received considerable attention in the hydrogenation of NBs.Recently These two methods which introduced inorganic uoride into metal catalysts obviously improved the catalytic performance. Whether could it achieve the same promoting effect for catalytic hydrogenation of NBs over RANEY® Ni by adding a small amount of metal uoride into the liquid phase reaction system? Herein, various metal uorides (NaF, KF, CaF 2 , and MgF 2 ) were explored to investigate the effect of these metal uorides on the hydrogenation of NBs to ANs over RANEY® Ni catalyst.The simplied reaction route of p-chloronitrobenzene (p-CNB) hydrogenation to p-chloroaniline (p-CAN) is displayed in Scheme 1. 2,32 The target product is p-CAN and the main intermediate product is p-chlorophenylhydroxylamine (p-CHB). As shown in Scheme 1, the process involves two steps that p-CNB is hydrogenated to produce p-CHB, and then p-CHB is further hydrogenated to form p-CAN. Generally, the hydrogenation of p-CNB over RANEY® Ni catalyst is slowly under mild conditions. The hydrogenation of p-CNB over original RANEY® Ni was repeated three times to guarantee that every batch of RANEY® nickel could perform similarly Scheme 1 Simplified reaction route of p-CNB hydrogenation to p-CAN.