Urea Anions: Simple, Fast, and Selective Catalysts for Ring-Opening Polymerizations

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• 作者：Binhong Lin ; Robert M. Waymouth
• 刊名：Journal of the American Chemical Society
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：February 1, 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：139
• 期：4
• 页码：1645-1652
• 全文大小：516K
• ISSN：1520-5126

文摘

Aliphatic polyesters and polycarbonates are a class of biorenewable, biocompatible, and biodegradable materials. One of the most powerful methods for accessing these materials is the ring-opening polymerization (ROP) of cyclic monomers. Here we report that the deprotonation of ureas generates a class of versatile catalysts that are simultaneously fast and selective for the living ring-opening polymerization of several common monomers, including lactide, δ-valerolactone, ε-caprolactone, a cyclic carbonate, and a cyclic phosphoester. Spanning several orders of magnitude, the reactivities of several diaryl urea anions correlated to the electron-withdrawing substituents on the aryl rings. With the appropriate urea anions, the polymerizations reached high conversions (∼90%) at room temperature within seconds (1–12 s), yielding polymers with narrow molecular weight distributions (Đ = 1.06 to 1.14). These versatile catalysts are simple to prepare, easy to use, and exhibit a range of activities that can be tuned for the optimal performance of a broad range of monomers.