Many polymerization processes are based ontransition metal based catalysts, which reveal to be impurities for someapplications (biomedical and microelectronics for example) and are very hard toremove from the polymer. As a consequence, it is of high interest to develop newalternatives based on non-metallic polymerization processes. An alternativewould be to utilize purely organic catalysts instead of organo-metalliccompounds. We then investigated the ring-opening polymerization (ROP) of L-lactidecatalyzed by equivalent amounts of N,N-dimethylaminopyridine (DMAP) and itsprotonated form (DMAP.HX), as a dual catalytic system able to activate bothmonomer and chain end. It was demonstrated that these new organic catalystsbased on cooperative acid-base functions could control the ROP of L-lactide (upto 15000 g/mol). L-lactide was polymerized quantitatively in less than 1h whenpolymerizations are performed in bulk at 100�C.

Ring opening polymerization of L-lactide by a new organo-catalytic system based on cooperative activation

239th National Meeting (2010)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.