Stereospecific polymerizations olefins

Ziegler-Natta polymerization Stereospecific polymerization of olefines using a Ziegler catalyst. See titanium(IIl) chloride. 

Titanium Trichloride. Titanium trichloride [7705-07-9] exists in four different soHd polymorphs that have been much studied because of the importance of TiCl as a catalyst for the stereospecific polymerization of olefins (120,124). The a-, y-, and 5-forms are all violet and have close-packed layers of chlorines. The titaniums occupy the octahedral interstices between the layers. The three forms differ in the arrangement of the titaniums among the available octahedral sites. In a-TiCl, the chlorine sheets are hexagonaHy close-packed in y-TiCl, they are cubic close-packed. The brown P-form does not have a layer stmcture but, instead, consists of linear strands of titaniums, where each titanium is coordinated by three chlorines that act as a bridge to the next Ti The stmctural parameters are as follows ... 

The Kinetics of the Stereospecific Polymerization of a-Olefins G. Natta and I. Pasquon Surface Potentials and Adsorption Process on Metals... 

Moreover, the molecular catalysts have provided systematic opportunities to study the mechanisms of the initiation, propagation, and termination steps of coordination polymerization and the mechanisms of stereospecific polymerization. This has significantly contributed to advances in the rational design of catalysts for the controlled (co)polymerization of olefinic monomers. Altogether, the development of high performance molecular catalysts has made a dramatic impact on polymer synthesis and catalysis chemistry. There is thus great interest in the development of new molecular catalysts for olefin polymerization with a view to achieving unique catalysis and distinctive polymer synthesis. 

Possible elements of chirality in stereospecific polymerizations will be briefly recalled in order to indicate the used terminology. First of all, upon coordination, a prochiral olefin such as propene gives rise to not superpos-able si and re coordinations.22 According to the mechanism described, the isotactic polymer is generated by a large series of insertions of all si- or all re-coordinated monomers, while the syndiotactic polymer would be generated by alternate insertions of si - and re-coordinated monomers. 

Aspects concerning the regio- and stereochemical behavior of these catalysts in the stereospecific polymerization of propene (or 1-olefins, in general) will be not discussed in details since these topics are at the center of several reviews recently published [11, 12, 14, 24, 25], Nevertheless, in the final sections we will briefly report about these points. 

A necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite for models of catalysts for the stereospecific polymerization of 1-olefins polymerization, is the stereoselectivity of each monomer insertion step. The possible origin of stereoselectivity in this class of systems was investigated through simple molecular mechanics calculations [11, 14, 24, 32, 52, 78-80, 82-86]. 

Figure 12. Scheme of stereospecific 1-olefins polymerization with generic C2 and Cs symmetric metallocenes. In the framework of a regular chain migratory mechanism, the C2 and Cs symmetric catalysts lead to iso- and syndiotactic polymers, respectively. In fact, multiple insertions of the same enantioface occur with C2 symmetric metallocenes, while multiple insertions of alternating enantiofaces occur with Cs metallocenes. 

One of the first reactions to be studied systematically in a channel-type clathrate was the polymerization of olefins or diolefins. The ordering of the monomers within the clathrate lattice leads to stereoregular products that are not available by other techniques (232-234). Such radiation-induced stereospecific polymerization has been reported for a number of clathrate hosts (235). 

He was a Professor of Industrial Chemistry, School of Engineering, Polytechnic Institute of Milan, Milan, Italy since 1937. He became involved with applied research, which led to the production of synthetic rubber in Italy, at the Institute in 1938. He was also interested in the synthesis of petrochemicals such as butadiene and, later, oxo alcohols. At the same time he made important contributions to the understanding of the kinetics of some catalytic processes in both the heterogeneous (methanol synthesis) and homogeneous (oxosynthesis) phase. In 1950, as a result of his interest in petrochemistry, he initiated the research on the use of simple olefins for the synthesis of high polymers. This work led to the discovery, in 1954, of stereospecific polymerization. In this type of polymerization nonsymmetric monomers (e.g., propylene, 1-butene, etc.) produce linear high polymers with a stereoregular structure. 

In the polymer field, reactions of this type are subject to several limitations related to the structure and symmetry of the resultant polymers. In effect, the stereospecific polymerization of propylene is in itself an enantioface-diflferen-tiating reaction, but the polymer lacks chirality. As already seen in Sect. V-A there are few intrinsically chiral stractures (254) and even fewer that can be obtained from achiral monomers. With two exceptions, which will be dealt with at the end of this section, optically active polymers have been obtained only from 1- or 1,4-substituted butadienes, fiom unsaturated cyclic monomers, fiom substituted benzalacetone, or by copolymerization of mono- and disubstituted olefins. The corresponding polymer stmctures are shown as formulas 32 and 33, 53, 77-79 and 82-89. These processes are called asymmetric polymerizations (254, 257) the name enantiogenic polymerization has been recently proposed (301). 

The stereospecific polymerization of a-olefins takes place only in the presence of heterogeneous catalytic systems, including a crystalline substrate (formed by halides of transition metals, such as TiCb, TiCb, VCI3, CrCla, C0CI2, etc.) and a suitable metallorganic compound (5). 

For this reason the catalytic systems, which we have mostly employed for studies of stereospecific polymerization of a-olefins, are those made using a-TiCU. 

Another important use of BC13 is as a Friedel-Crafts catalyst in various polymerization, alkylation, and acylation reactions, and in other organic syntheses (see Friedel-Crafts reaction). Examples include conversion of cydophosphazenes to polymers (81,82) polymerization of olefins such as ethylene (75,83—88) graft polymerization of vinyl chloride and isobutylene (89) stereospecific polymerization of propylene (90) copolymerization of isobutylene and styrene (91,92), and other unsaturated aromatics with maleic anhydride (93) polymerization of norbomene (94), butadiene (95) preparation of electrically conducting epoxy resins (96), and polymers containing B and N (97) and selective demethylation of methoxy groups ortho to OH groups (98). 

A very important field of polymerization, stereospecific polymerization, was opened in 1955. In this year, Natta and his coworkers (1—3) polymerized a-olefins to crystalline isotactic poly-a-olefins with the Ziegler catalyst, and Pruitt and Baggett (4,5) polymerized dl-propylene oxide to crystalline polypropylene oxide, which was later identified as an isotactic polymer by Price and his coworkers (6,7). Since then, a large number of compounds including both unsaturated and cyclic compounds were polymerized stereospecifically and asymmetrically. Development of the stereospecific polymerization stimulated... 

It is not necessary to incorporate the concept of macrosurfaces nor of olefinic coordination complexes of the metal in order to explain stereospecific polymerization. Simple 4 and 6 membered cyclic transition states account for steric control. 

Stereospecific Polymerization. In the early 1950s, Ziegler observed that certain heterogeneous catalysts based on transition metals polymerized ethylene to a linear, high density material at modest pressures and temperatures. N atta showed that these catalysts also could produce highly stereospecific poly-a-olefins, notably isotactic polypropylene, and polydienes. They shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work. More recently, metallocene catalysts that provide even greater control of molecular structure have been introduced. 

The Kinetics of the Stereospecific Polymerization of a-Olefins G. Natta and I. Pasquon Surface Potentials and Adsorption Process on Metals R. V. Culver and F. C. Tompkins Gas Reactions of Carbon P. L. Walker, Jr., Frank Rusinko, Jr., and L. G. Austin The Catalytic Exchange of Hydrocarbons with Deuterium C. Kemball... 

The development of organometallic initiators, both of the lithium type and of the transition-metal coordination type, occurred rapidly in the decade following the late 1950s. The lithium initiators were developed without the fanfare of coordination-type initiators. This situation developed because of the remarkable ability of the coordination catalysts to induce stereospecific polymerization of a-olefins. 

An isotactic stereospecific polymerization arises essentially from the favored complexation of one prochiral face of the a-olefin, followed by a stereospecific process. The stereospecific insertion process and the stereospecific polymerization of racemic a-olefins giving isotactic polymers may be expected to be stereoselective whenever the asymmetric carbon atom is in an a- or /3-position relative to the double bond, and when the interaction between the chirality center of the olefin and the chiral catalytic site is negligible. 

As already mentioned, nearly all experiments and theories agree that polymerization occurs by addition of an olefin to a catalyst center, followed by insertion of the (stereoregulated, sometimes stereospecific) complexed olefin into a metal-carbon bond at the catalyst center. Figure 9 shows how such an active center can be situated at the edge of a crystal-lattice. It will be seen that the environment of the coordinatively unsaturated, but alkylated, Ti atom demands the stereospecific coordination of the propylene (81). 

The interaction of unsaturated molecules, for example olefins and acetylenes, with transition metals is of paramount importance for a variety of chemical processes. Included among such processes are stereospecific polymerization of olefin monomers, the production of alcohols and aldehydes in the hydroformylation reaction, hydrogenation reactions, cyclo-propanation, isomerizations, hydrocyanation, and many other reactions. 

Previously, we synthesized and studied various Group 4 complexes with different ligations as alternatives to the cyclopentadienyl ligand. Here we present an overview of the synthesis, structure, and catalytic properties in the polymerization of a-olefins of several zirconium octahedral complexes. We show how the stereoregular polymerization of a-olefins using these octahedral zirconium complexes can be modulated by pressure. These results raise conceptual questions regarding the general applicability of ds-octahedral C2-sym-metry complexes to the stereospecific polymerization of a-olefins. 

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