This award was sent to presenters who gave good oral presentations in the annual conference of Chemical Society Japan (CSJ) in 2015.
Direct incorporation of polar monomers into polyolefin has been pursued to enable straightforward access to diversely functionalized materials. Despite recent advances in ethylene/polar monomer copolymerization using late-transition-metal catalysts, similar trials for propylene have been unsuccessful.
In this research, we developed palladium catalysts bearing imidazo[1,5-a]quinolin-9-olate-1-ylidene (IzQO) ligands, which can polymerize α-olefins while incorporating polar monomers. Known polymerization catalysts bearing N-heterocyclic-carbene (NHC) based ligands decompose rapidly, whereas the present catalyst is durable because of structural confinement, wherein the NHC-plane is coplanar to the metal square plane. Then, the steric environment provided by NHC enables regioselective insertion of α-olefins and polar monomers, yielding polypropylene, propylene/polar monomer copolymers.
It’s an honor to receive such a wonderful prize. I am grateful to Prof. Kyoko Nozaki and all the current, former group members for fruitful discussions.