Mechanism-inspired Design of Heterodinuclear Catalysts for Copolymerization of Epoxide and Lactone

Polyesters, as a class of high-performance and versatile polymer materials, often suffer from some drawbacks, such as hydrophobicity and brittleness due to their single structure nature. Thus, modifications have attracted much attention for enhancing their desirable properties, of which one efficient way is incorporating the aliphatic polyether segment into the main chain of the polyester. However, this approach is of much challenge because the obtained polyesters are problematic in either low alternating degree or low molecular weight. Herein, we describe an efficient strategy to incorporate polyether fragment into polyester by developing a novel Co-AI based heterodinuclear complex for mediating the copolymerization of propylene oxide (PO) with epsilon-caprolactone (CL). The tracking experiments reveal that PO and CL convert into the polymer chain throughout the polymerization process. Especially, the linear increase in the molecular weight with conversion of CL indicates the controllable nature of the copolymerization. The competition polymerization, offering the monomer reactivity ratios of r(CL) = 0.96 and r(PO) = 1.04, suggests that the tendency of self-propagation or incorporation of monomers is nearly identical. Interestingly, the obtained polymers with different ether contents exhibit tunable thermal properties with enhanced decomposition temperature for the polymer with higher ether content. The newly developed heterodinuclear complex for new polymerization provides an idea to synthesize new functional polymeric materials.