Please find the attached articles herewith, which explains basic information about the utilization of Alumina materials as supports for metal nano-particles. Hope these articles help you.
r-Alumina are good support for many heterogeneous catalysis. It can also be treated with some chloro-compounds to enhance acidity and use as acidic support for some heterogeneous catalytic reaction in petroleum refining.
What kind of heterogeneous acid catalyst you try to prepare?
Alumina can be used as an active catalyst as it showed acidic sites (mainly Lewis acidic sites) and also it can be used as a support and this is due to its high surface area, mechanically stable and the porous structure.
Please find the attached paper that discussed the different phases of alumina and the effect of the precursor, calcination temperature on the prepared alumina catalyst