Organolithium compounds properties

Organolithium compounds are sometimes prepared in hydrocarbon solvents such as pentane and hexane, but nonnally diethyl ether is used. It is especially important that the solvent be anhydrous. Even trace amounts of water or alcohols react with lithium to form insoluble lithium hydroxide or lithium alkoxides that coat the surface of the metal and prevent it from reacting with the alkyl halide. Furthennore, organolithium reagents are strong bases and react rapidly with even weak proton sources to fonn hydrocarbons. We shall discuss this property of organolithium reagents in Section 14.5. 

Lewis bases effect dramatic changes in microstructure, initiation rates, propagation rates, and monomer reactivity ratios for alkyllithium—initiated polymerizations of vinyl monomers (1-6). Some insight into the molecular basis for these observations has been provided by a variety of NMR, colligative property, and light-scattering measurements of simple and polymeric organolithium compounds in hydrocarbon and basic solvents... 

Meanwhile, development of coordination catalyst was proceeding full scale. The polyisoprene prepared using this coordination catalyst (TiClj, AIR ) proved to be more suitable in physical properties than the one made by lithium metal or organolithium compounds in hydrocarbon media. The Ziegler polyisoprene, as it was called, has greater stereoregularity and stress-induced crystallization properties than polyisoprene made by the alkyl lithium catalyst. How-... 

For the above reasons, organolithium compounds and complexes have been termed supramolecules [ complex molecules held together by noncovalent bonds (4) ]. What we have here are ionically bonded (at least as far as the central metal-organic anion linkages are concerned) yet often discrete molecular species. Most of their physical properties reflect their limited aggregation and their organic peripheries. These points are stressed in Fig. 3, a schematic presentation of the major structural types of uncomplexed organic lithium compounds. 

The most dramatic effects of Lewis bases in organolithium chemistry are observed in polymerization reactions. Aside from colligative property measurements, there is little direct quantitative information on the nature of the organolithium-base interactions responsible for the observed effects. The calorimetric method has been used also to examine the fundamental nature of the interaction of bases with polymeric organolithium compounds 83,88,89). Information is now available on the ground-state interaction of bases with poly(styryl)lithium (PSLi), poly(isoprenyl)lithium (PILi) and poly(butadienyl)lithium (PBDLi). 

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