Prof. Wu Zongquan from Hefei University of Technology/Jilin University "Nature Communications": Strategies for Synthesis of Polycarbene Homopolymers and π-Conjugated Copolymers by Nickel(II) Catalytic Activity Controlled Polymerization of Diazoate

Carbon-carbon (CC) backbone polymers are a class of polymer materials widely used in daily life.

The research group of Prof.

Figure 1.

1.

The research team first optimized the polymerization conditions and tried a series of catalytic systems composed of different Ni compounds (R'–Ni–X) and different ligands (L1–L6) to induce benzyl diazoacetate (1a) The polymerization reaction was studied, as shown in Figure 2

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

2.

Next, the research team studied the polymerization kinetics of BT–Ni(dppp)Cl-initiated polymerization of diazo monomer 1a (internal standard is polystyrene; Mn = 41.

Figure 4.

3.

Since BT-Ni(dppp)Cl showed excellent performance during the polymerization of diazotate, the team tried to study the functional polymer with similar Ni(II)-complex ends to initiate the living polymerization of diazoacetic acid, thereby obtaining Functional block copolymers

Figure 5.

Using the above-mentioned functional polymer P3HT-initiated diazotate polymerization strategy, a series of π-conjugated copolymers with controllable molecular weight and structure, such as amphiphilic block copolymers, can be prepared

The significance of this study is to establish a method for the controllable polymerization of diazotes with non-noble metal Ni(II) catalysts, and to easily synthesize CC backbone polymers and π-conjugated interpolymers with substituents on each backbone carbon atom.

The above related research results were published in Nature Communications (Nat.
Commun.
13, 811 (2022))
.
The co-first authors of the paper are Zhou Li, a teacher from the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, and Xu Lei, a postdoctoral fellow, and the corresponding author is Professor Wu Zongquan.
Currently, they have joined the State Key Laboratory of Supramolecular Structure and Materials, Jilin University
.