 As is the case in all areas of organic chemistry, the simplification of any synthetic process is a goal of chemists in order to obtain the product as easily and efficiently as possible. It is of special interest to polymer chemists to be able to make cyclic polymers in high yields under lenient conditions, as achieving this specific polymeric architecture is generally a tedious process. Typically, linear polymers are synthesized, isolated, end-functionalized, and then finally employed in a cyclization reaction. An approach reported by our group involves atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) to synthesize the linear polymers that are then directly used in an atom transfer radical coupling (ATRC) type reaction, where the same steps of purification and isolation are required in between each phase. Our research group has shown that the ATRP reaction can be directly crossed over to an ATRC type reaction without the purification step that would have previously removed any excess monomer, catalyst, and ligand. Here, we show that cyclic polymers are produced by converting an ATRP reaction of styrene into an intramolecular radical trap-assisted ATRC (RTA-ATRC) reaction by manipulating the reaction conditions.

Streamlining the synthesis of macrocyclic polymers by direct cross over from atom transfer radical polymerization to radical trap-assisted atom transfer radical coupling

248th National Meeting (2014)

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