Recent advances in transition metal catalysed dehydropolymerisation of amine boranes and phosphine boranes

The field of amine borane chemistry has seen significant advances and fascinating developments in the last decade, mostly driven by the potential use of hydrogen-rich amine boranes as hydrogen storage media. Along with this, organometallic chemists have more and more looked into the mechanistic aspects of N-H and B-H bond activation to improve catalytic systems that are now known for most of the transition metals and several main group metals. Dehydrogenation of amine boranes and related phosphine boranes that looks more into the B-N and B-P products formed rather than the amount of hydrogen released is an interesting reaction that gives rise to aminoboranes and phosphinoboranes, formally isoelectronic main group analogues of olefins. Coupling of these allows for the production of inorganic polyolefins, a class of compounds that has great potential for applications as high-performance polymeric materials, pre-ceramics or as precursors to functional B-N/P materials. In this review, a survey of catalysts for dehydropolymerisation of primary amine boranes and phosphine boranes is presented along with selected systems that are active for dehydrocoupling of secondary amine boranes and phosphine boranes to highlight mechanistic aspects of these conversions. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.