Our research group has developed a series of novel electropolymerizable monomers that incorporate well-defined metal complexes directly into conducting polymer backbones. These hybrid electroactive materials known as conducting metallopolymers  have a variety of applications including light-emitting devices, sensors, separation materials, and catalytically-active polymers. This unique class of materials exploits the properties of both the conducting polymers and the metal centers in a cooperative fashion. For example, in the development of electrocatalysts the redox-active polymer backbone can serve as an effective way to shuttle charge to the catalytically-active metal center. In another embodiment of these materials, the conducting polymer backbone can be used as a redox-attenuated ligand to precisely and directly tune the activity of a catalytically active metal center. Through the use of specifically-designed ligands that possess both a binding site for a catalytic metal center and functional groups that undergo electropolymerization, the highly-controlled growth of conducting metallopolymer materials has been accomplished. The catalytically-active metal centers have been judiciously chosen for activity in either important electrocatalytic transformations or chemical catalysis that would benefit from on/off attenuation. Our results concerning the design, synthesis, characterization, electrochemistry, and catalytic properties of a new class of conducting metallopolymer hybrid materials containing catalytically-active metal centers will be discussed in detail.

Catalytic conducting metallopolymer materials

248th National Meeting (2014)

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