Ziegler-Natta polymerization metal oxide catalysts

Polymerization Ziegler-Natta, supported metal oxides such as PhiUps, Unipol and metallocene Stereospecific chain formation required weak interaction/complexation with any initiators/catalysts metal coordination complexes required... 

Linear high-density polyethylene (HDPE) is mainly manufactured by using traditional Ziegler-Natta and metal oxide Philips-type initiators in suspension polymerization [173]. More expensive metallocene catalysts are also used but accoimted for less than 5% of the total HDPE production in 2002 [172]. About 14 billion pounds of high density polyethylene was produced in the United States in 2001. 

Advances in PE polymerization technology and catalysts enable a resin producer to generate a series of PEs with different molecular weight distributions yielding a variety of performance properties. There are three major development stages Ziegler—Natta, supported metal oxides, and metallocenes (Rodriguez, 1996). 

Chemical Properties. Higher a-olefins are exceedingly reactive because their double bond provides the reactive site for catalytic activation as well as numerous radical and ionic reactions. These olefins also participate in additional reactions, such as oxidations, hydrogenation, double-bond isomerization, complex formation with transition-metal derivatives, polymerization, and copolymerization with other olefins in the presence of Ziegler-Natta, metallocene, and cationic catalysts. All olefins readily form peroxides by exposure to air. 

Examples of synergistic effects are now very numerous in catalysis. We shall restrict ourselves to metallic oxide-type catalysts for selective (amm)oxidation and oxidative dehydrogenation of hydrocarbons, and to supported metals, in the case of the three-way catalysts for abatement of automotive pollutants. A complementary example can be found with Ziegler-Natta polymerization of ethylene on transition metal chlorides [1]. To our opinion, an actual synergistic effect can be claimed only when the following conditions are filled (i), when the catalytic system is, thermodynamically speaking, biphasic (or multiphasic), (ii), when the catalytic properties are drastically enhanced for a particular composition, while they are (comparatively) poor for each single component. Therefore, neither promotors in solid solution in the main phase nor solid solutions themselves are directly concerned. Multicomponent catalysts, as the well known multimetallic molybdates used in ammoxidation of propene to acrylonitrile [2, 3], and supported oxide-type catalysts [4-10], provide the most numerous cases to be considered. Supported monolayer catalysts now widely used in selective oxidation can be considered as the limit of a two-phase system. 

Oxides of a variety of metals on finely divided inert support materials initiate polymerization of ethylene and other vinyl monomers by a mechanism that is assumed to be similar to that of heterogeneous Ziegler-Natta polymerization that is, initiation probably occurs at active sites on the catalyst surface [2j. Unlike the traditional Ziegler-Natta two-component catalyst systems, the supported metal-oxide catalysts are essentially one-component systems. Among the metals that have been investigated for these catalyst... 

The difference in polymerization mechanism between one-component metal oxide catalysts and traditional Ziegler-Natta two-component catalysts seems to exist only in the initiation stage, while the mechanism of continued propagation of polymer chain has many common features for all the catalyst systems based on transition metal compounds. Thus most studies of the chromium oxide catalyst system, for example, deal either with the nature... 

In the following review we will focus on two classes of systems dispersed metal particles on oxide supports as used for a large variety of catalytic reactions and a model Ziegler-Natta catalyst for low pressure olefin polymerization. The discussion of the first system will focus on the characterization of the environment of deposited metal atoms. To this end, we will discuss the prospects of metal carbonyls, which may be formed during the reaction of metal deposits with a CO gas phase, as probes for mapping the environment of deposited metal atoms [15-19]. 

We have reviewed experiments on two classes of systems, namely small metal particles and atoms on oxide surfaces, and Ziegler-Natta model catalysts. We have shown that metal carbonyls prepared in situ by reaction of deposited metal atoms with CO from the gas phase are suitable probes for the environment of the adsorbed metal atoms and thus for the properties of the nucleation site. In addition, examples of the distinct chemical and physical properties of low coordinated metal atoms as compared to regular metal adsorption sites were demonstrated. For the Ziegler-Natta model catalysts it was demonstrated how combination of different surface science methods can help to gain insight into a variety of microscopic properties of surface sites involved in the polymerization reaction. 

The initiation of polymerizations by metal-containing catalysts broadens the synthetic possibilities significantly. In many cases it is the only useful method to polymerize certain kinds of monomers or to polymerize them in a stereospecific way. Examples for metal-containing catalysts are chromium oxide-containing catalysts (Phillips-Catalysts) for ethylene polymerization, metal organic coordination catalysts (Ziegler-Natta catalysts) for the polymerization of ethylene, a-olefins and dienes (see Sect. 3.3.1), palladium catalysts and the metallocene catalysts (see Sect. 3.3.2) that initiate not only the polymerization of (cyclo)olefins and dienes but also of some polar monomers. 

A soluble titanium-based modified Ziegler-Natta catalyst [Ti(OR)4-Et3Al, R = n-Bu, isoPr] is employed in the reaction.42 Since similar catalysts may be used for the oligomerization and polymerization of ethylene, the nature and oxidation state of the metal and reaction conditions determine selectivity. Ti4+ was found to be responsible for high dimerization selectivity, whereas polymerization was shown to be catalyzed by Ti3+. According to a proposed mechanism,42,43 this catalyst effects the concerted coupling of two molecules of ethylene to form a metal-lacyclopentane intermediate that decomposes via an intramolecular p-hydrogen transfer ... 

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