The catalytic performance of metal complexes immobilized on SBA-15 in the ring opening polymerization of ε-caprolactone with different metals (Ti, Al, Zn and Mg) and immobilization procedures.

A family of heterogeneous catalysts has been prepared by employing different strategies: firstly by direct reaction or grafting of titanium, zinc, aluminium and magnesium precursors with dehydrated SBA-15 and secondly by reaction of the metallic derivatives with a hybrid SBA-15 mesoporous material, which possesses a new covalently bonded linker based on an amino alcohol chelate ligand. These materials have been characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), N2 adsorption-desorption, FT-IR and multi-nuclear NMR spectroscopy. The catalytic performance of the prepared materials has been studied in the ring opening polymerization of ε-caprolactone and compared with that of their homogeneous counterparts. Conversion values obtained by using homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts depend on the metal precursor and the synthetic procedure. The most active heterogeneous Ti-SBA-15, Zn-SBA-15 and Zn-PADO-HMDS-SBA-15 catalysts produced poly(ε-caprolactone) with a narrow molecular weight distribution, close to one. In all cases polymerization was confirmed to proceed via a coordination insertion mechanism after end group analysis by (1)H NMR.