Catalysts in polymerisation

Among the light amines, the dimethylethylamine (DMEA) is quite an important product i.e. as a catalyst in polymerisation processes. DMEA can he prepared from the reaction of ethanol with dimethylamine or from the reaction of methanol with monoethyiamine ... 

Tripotassium hexakiscyanoferrate [13746-66-2] K2[Fe(CN)g], forms anhydrous red crystals. The crystalline material is dimorphic both orthorhombic and monoclinic forms are known. The compound is obtained by chemical or electrolytic oxidation of hexacyanoferrate(4—). K2[Fe(CN)g] is soluble in water and acetone, but insoluble in alcohol. It is used in the manufacture of pigments, photographic papers, leather (qv), and textiles and is used as a catalyst in oxidation and polymerisation reactions. 

In attempts to understand more fully the mechanism of Ziegler-Natta polymerisations chemists came to develop what have become known as metallocene catalysts for polymerisation. In due course it was found possible to... 

The use of supported transition metal oxide and Ziegler-Natta-type catalysts for polymerising aliphatic olefins (alkenes) was extended in the 1960s and 1970s to the ring-opening polymerisation of cyclo-olefins. 

Typically, the reaetion would be carried out at 140°C in white spirit with potassium carbazole as a catalyst. Davidge ° has reported problems in polymerisation of V-vinyl carbazole prepared from carbazole obtained from coal tar, attributing this to the presence of sulphur. To overcome these problems carbazole has been prepared synthetically by reactions of cyclohexanone with... 

A method for the depolymerisation of PETP fibres using quarternary ammonium salt phase transfer catalysts in saponification processes at atmospheric pressure and temperatures as low as room temperature is reported. Terephthalic acid was produced in yields as high as 93%. Also reported are similar processes for the depolymerisation of nylon 66 and nylon 46 fibres. Nylon 46 oligomers produced were repolymerised using solid-state polymerisation to produce high molecular weight nylon 46. Nylon 66 was depolymerised to produce oligomers and adipic acid in reasonable yields. 11 refs. USA... 

Given the success of the Grubbs-type NHC-Ru catalysts in metathesis polymerisation (Chapter 3), it is somewhat surprising that more research has not been done on mid-transition metal carbene complexes for coordination-insertion polymerisation. At this stage however, there are only a few reported attempts with the metals Co, Fe and Ir. 

Latex or emulsion polymers are prepared by emulsification of monomers in water by adding a surfactant. A water-soluble initiator is added, e.g., persulfate or hydrogen peroxide (with a metallic ion as catalyst), that polymerises the monomer yielding polymer particles, which have diameters of about 0.1 pm. The higher the concentration of surfactant added, the smaller the polymer particles. 

When irradiated in the presence of norbornadiene and high-pressure synthesis gas, rhodium chloride is converted to a catalyst which is active for a variety of reactions. /2A/. The salt is probably converted photochemically to the rhodium norbornadiene complex 9. This dimer may undergo a consecutive photoreaction to give the monomeric hydrido complex 10, which is the actual catalyst for polymerisation, hydrogenation, and hydroformylation reactions. 

A vulcanising agent particularly for silicone rubber and fluoroelastomers it has been used as a non-sulphur vulcanising agent for natural rubber. It is also a catalyst in emulsion polymerisation. Beta Rays... 

For a more in depth coverage of the use of ill-defined catalysts in cross-metathesis, see Ivin KJ, Mol JC (1997) Olefin metathesis and metathesis polymerisation. Academic Press, San Diego, Chap 9... 

In 1936, Lewis acids were used as catalysts for polymerisation. Grignard reagents were used for polymerisation in 1945. Since 1956, there are innumerable paper on different types of ionic polymerisations. 

A ubiquitous co-catalyst is water. This can be effective in extremely small quantities, as was first shown by Evans and Meadows [18] for the polymerisation of isobutene by boron fluoride at low temperatures, although they could give no quantitative estimate of the amount of water required to co-catalyse this reaction. Later [11, 13] it was shown that in methylene dichloride solution at temperatures below about -60° a few micromoles of water are sufficient to polymerise completely some decimoles of isobutene in the presence of millimolar quantities of titanium tetrachloride. With stannic chloride at -78° the maximum reaction rate is obtained with quantities of water equivalent to that of stannic chloride [31]. As far as aluminium chloride is concerned, there is no rigorous proof that it does require a co-catalyst in order to polymerise isobutene. However, the need for a co-catalyst in isomerisations and alkylations catalysed by aluminium bromide (which is more active than the chloride) has been proved [34-37], so that there is little doubt that even the polymerisations carried out by Kennedy and Thomas with aluminium chloride (see Section 5, iii, (a)) under fairly rigorous conditions depended critically on the presence of a co-catalyst - though whether this was water, or hydrogen chloride, or some other substance, cannot be decided at present. 

Feeney, Holliday, and Marsden reported that when diboron tetrachloride and isobutene were mixed in a molar ratio of approximately 1 2, without solvent at -78°, the isobutene was polymerised to a rubbery polymer. It is likely that adventitious water, or a reaction product of water and the B2C14, was the co-catalyst in this reaction [39]. 

The first study with an oxygen compound which was sufficiently rigorous to provide evidence on the question of co-catalysis was that of Farthing and Reynolds [61]. They showed that 3,3-bischloromethyl oxetan could be polymerised in methyl chloride solution by boron fluoride only in the presence of water. Tater, Rose [62] obtained kinetic evidence for the need for a co-catalyst in the system oxetan—boron fluoride—methyl chloride, and he interpreted the low reaction rate when no water was added as due to residual water he also showed that water and a hydroxyl-terminated polymer could act as co-catalysts. 

With respect to the co-catalytic activity of alkyl halides, BF3 occupies a special position, since these (other than fluorides) cannot form complexes with BF3 for steric reasons. It has indeed been found [31a] that in MeCl solution the n-butenes are not polymerised by BF3. MeCl cannot act as co-catalyst in this system and some other (e.g., S02) was required. The mode of action of S02 is still obscure, but it is possible that H2S03 was the real co-catalyst. 

The only studies on olefin polymerisations in methylene dichloride in which kp was deduced directly from the rate of reaction were carried out by Ledwith and his collaborators [9, 13] with extremely low concentrations of monomer and catalyst. They polymerised isobutyl vinyl ether and N-vinyl carbazole in a Biddulph-Plesch calorimeter with trityl or tropylium salts and obtained the first-order rate constants k1 from the conversion curves. Since different catalysts gave the same ratio of kx c they concluded that for each of them Xxr = c0 and hence identified with kp which must in fact be k p, as explained above. It seems unlikely that if several initiators give the same value of kp, they do so because they are all equally inefficient, and the inference that they do so because they are all 100% efficient, i.e., that for all of them x = c0, seems plausible - but it would be useful to have a direct check of this. 

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