The Influence of Ziegler-Natta and Metallocene Catalysts on Polyolefin Structure, Properties, and Processing Ability

Materials

Ahmad Shamiri¹  Mohammed H. Chakrabarti¹  Shah Jahan¹  Mohd Azlan Hussain¹  Walter Kaminsky¹  Purushothaman V. Aravind¹ 

[1] ¹Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya,50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

关键词: polyolefin;    Ziegler-Natta catalyst;    methylaluminoxane;    metallocene;    co-catalysts;   

DOI  :  10.3390/ma7075069

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

50 years ago, Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the catalytic polymerization of ethylene and propylene using titanium compounds and aluminum-alkyls as co-catalysts. Polyolefins have grown to become one of the biggest of all produced polymers. New metallocene/methylaluminoxane (MAO) catalysts open the possibility to synthesize polymers with highly defined microstructure, tacticity, and steroregularity, as well as long-chain branched, or blocky copolymers with excellent properties. This improvement in polymerization is possible due to the single active sites available on the metallocene catalysts in contrast to their traditional counterparts. Moreover, these catalysts, half titanocenes/MAO, zirconocenes, and other single site catalysts can control various important parameters, such as co-monomer distribution, molecular weight, molecular weight distribution, molecular architecture, stereo-specificity, degree of linearity, and branching of the polymer. However, in most cases research in this area has reduced academia as olefin polymerization has seen significant advancements in the industries. Therefore, this paper aims to further motivate interest in polyolefin research in academia by highlighting promising and open areas for the future.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.