Synthesis of Reactive and Responsive Copolyether Materials by Ring-Opening Anionic Polymerization

摘要

The ring-opening anionic polymerization of strained cyclic epoxide monomers provides a versatile platform for synthesizing polyether materials with controlled molecular weights, compositions, and chemical functionalities derived from a large library of potential epoxide monomers, e.g., the glycidyl ethers. The source of this control and versatility is that the polymerization is driven by ring-strain, which depends little on the exact identity of pendant functional groups. Researchers have exploited this fact to generate libraries of copolymers between ethylene oxide, glycidyl ethers, and recently glycidyl amines. Unfortunately, understanding of the trends in reactivity in epoxide copolymerizations has remained largely qualitative with the exception of a few comonomer pairs, e.g., ethylene oxide and propylene oxide. Advances in our group have recently provided practical and conceptual tools to understand the trends in relative reactivity in epoxide copolymerizations (see Scheme 1).