Issue 7, 2017

Fluoride-promoted carbonylation polymerization: a facile step-growth technique to polycarbonates

Abstract

Fluoride-Promoted Carbonylation (FPC) polymerization is herein presented as a novel catalytic polymerization methodology that complements ROP and unlocks a greater synthetic window to advanced polycarbonates. The overall two-step strategy is facile, robust and capitalizes on the synthesis and step-growth polymerization of bis-carbonylimidazolide and diol monomers of 1,3- or higher configurations. Cesium fluoride (CsF) is identified as an efficient catalyst and the bis-carbonylimidazolide monomers are synthesized as bench-stable white solids, easily obtained on 50–100 g scales from their parent diols using cheap commercial 1,1′-carbonyldiimidazole (CDI) as activating reagent. The FPC polymerization works well in both solution and bulk, does not require any stoichiometric additives or complex settings and produces only imidazole as a relatively low-toxicity by-product. As a proof-of-concept using only four diol building-blocks, FPC methodology enabled the synthesis of a unique library of polycarbonates covering (i) rigid, flexible and reactive PC backbones, (ii) molecular weights 5–20 kg mol−1, (iii) dispersities of 1.3–2.9 and (iv) a wide span of glass transition temperatures, from −45 up to 169 °C.

Graphical abstract: Fluoride-promoted carbonylation polymerization: a facile step-growth technique to polycarbonates

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
21 Dec 2016
Accepted
03 May 2017
First published
04 May 2017
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2017,8, 4853-4857

Fluoride-promoted carbonylation polymerization: a facile step-growth technique to polycarbonates

J. V. Olsson, D. Hult, S. García-Gallego and M. Malkoch, Chem. Sci., 2017, 8, 4853 DOI: 10.1039/C6SC05582F

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements