Along with a growing demand on functional polymers in a wide range of interdisciplinary applications, polymers with readily clickable groups received increasing attention because of their robust and reliable ability to produce functional materials without painful procedures. A number of click type reactions have been employed in order to expand the scope of functional materials obtained by post-polymerization modification. This includes thiol-ene, thiol-maleimide, nucleophile-isocyanate, activated ester-amine reactions, and Cu(I) catalyzed and metal-free 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reactions between organo-azides and acetylenes, which all realize practically quantitative conversions during the post-polymerization modification step. Despite a high efficiency of click reactions, intrinsic and inevitable synthetic limitations of above mentioned click reactions exist. To be precise, the limitations are 1) the number of installable functional units is only one per a monomeric unit and 2) the bonding generated by click reactions along with an installation of desired molecules show no functionality themselves. In order to accelerate the production of polymeric materials via post-modification process based on click reactions, these synthetic limitations should be overcome. In this context, the author paid attention to a renovation of post-modification processes by introducing highly efficient organic transformation reactions into polymer chemistry. When turning attention to a development of organic chemistry, a series of multicomponent reactions (MCRs) have appeared as an innovative synthetic methodology. Although multicomponent reactions triggered new chemistry and applications, a few attentions have been paid in the field of polymer chemistry. In this presentation, the author will show a new synthetic possibility of post-modification reactions by employing MCRs and applications thereof for producing highly functionalized polymers (Scheme).

New polymer synthesis strategy based on multicomponent reactions

249th National Meeting (2015)

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