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Organic Catalysis: A New and Broadly Useful Strategy for Living Polymerization

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Biodegradable Polymers and Plastics

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Abstract

Significant effort has gone into the development of biodegradable polymers over the past few decades with the purpose of designing resorbable biomaterials, and, more recently, for designing commodity thermoplastics from renewable resources. Aliphatic polyesters, particularly polylactide, combine biocompatibility and biodegradability with remarkable physical properties and have the requisite thermal stability at processing temperatures. One of the most common synthetic routes to polyesters uses transition metal initiation compounds to affect the ring-opening polymerization (ROP) of the cyclic ester monomer. Advances in organometallic chemistry in the design and synthesis of single-site metal catalysts for ROP techniques1 has enabled the preparation of well-defined functional polymeric materials with predictable molecular weights, narrow polydispersities, architectural and stereochemical control. The ring-opening (ROP) polymerization of lactide has been accomplished from a variety of metal catalysts including aluminium, tin, zinc and yttrium through a coordination-insertion mechanism.2 Removal of the metal contaminant, bound to the chain-end, must be considered for many applications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, 95120, USA

    Gregory W. Nyce, Eric F. Connor, T. Glauser, Andreas Möck & James L. Hedrick

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  1. Gregory W. Nyce
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  2. Eric F. Connor
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  3. T. Glauser
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  4. Andreas Möck
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  1. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Emo Chiellini  & Roberto Solaro  & 

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Nyce, G.W., Connor, E.F., Glauser, T., Möck, A., Hedrick, J.L. (2003). Organic Catalysis: A New and Broadly Useful Strategy for Living Polymerization. In: Chiellini, E., Solaro, R. (eds) Biodegradable Polymers and Plastics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9240-6_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9240-6_23

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