Science China Chemistry ( IF 10.4 ) Pub Date : 2024-07-03 , DOI: 10.1007/s11426-024-2105-8 Chunhuan Jiang , Junqi Wang , Xiaoyu Liu , Xiaoxia You , Ronglin Zhong , Chuanli Ren , Zhibo Li
It is highly desirable to develop simple organocatalysts for the controlled ring-opening alternating copolymerization (ROAC) of epoxides and cyclic anhydrides, leading to high molecular weight polyesters. Hence, a phosphazenium salt, namely tri[tris (dimethylamino)phosphoranylidenamino]phosphonium chloride (P4+Cl−), is developed as a catalyst for the ROAC of epoxides and cyclic anhydrides. Surprisingly, the combination of P4+Cl− with a protonic initiator, such as 1,4-benzenedimethanol (BDM) exhibited high efficiency in the copolymerization of propylene oxide (PO) and phthalic anhydride (PA). This led to the production of polyester with an exceptional high molecular weight (Mn) of up to 126 kDa, which represented a rare example of poly(PO-alt-PA) with Mn surpassing 100 kDa. Note that the core P atom is trivalent status and the tris[tris(dimethylamino)] phosphoranyl group will share one proton in the P4+Cl− salt. Once combined with protonic species, the P4+Cl− will not only serve as a proton acceptor but also as a hydrogen bonding donor for the cyclic anhydrides. Therefore, it was assumed that the P4+ plus proton served dual role in mimic of base/urea pair to effectively catalyze ROAC, which was supported by density functional theory (DFT) calculations.