Titanium aluminium methylene

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. 

Supposition 1. In the paper in which we first described the self-ionisation of titanium tetrachloride in methylene dichloride or ethyl chloride, we also showed that the conductivity measurements on aluminium bromide solutions available at that time could be explained by a self-ionisation of the type... 

Preparation by reaction of 2,4-diaminobenzoyl chloride with trimethylsilyl derivative of m-cresol in the presence of stannic chloride (or titanium tetrachloride or aluminium chloride) in refluxing methylene chloride for 2 h [921],... 

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