The recovery and recyclability of catalysts is an objective of green chemistry that can achieved by attaching polymeric supports to such catalysts. For example, polymer supported catalysts, ligands, sequestrants or reagents and liquid/liquid biphasic systems have been used to facilitate organic synthesis by recovering and recycling of catalysts using a polymer’s phase selective solubility. Thermomorphic biphasic systems consist of two or more immiscible solvent phases at room temperature, where the polymer supported catalyst is phase-selective to one of the phases and exemplify this green chemistry strategy. However, while these strategies allow for single phase reactions, small amounts of leaching of the polymer-bound catalyst still occurs. This project describes a new inexpensive way to further minimize this loss of a ligand or precious metal catalyst. Polyisobutylene (PIB), a hydrophobic polymer, was used as the polymer support. Polyisobutylene-bound dyes were first prepared and then used as surrogates of the polymer-bound catalyst to test how polymeric cosolvets affect the separation efficiency of these catalyst/ligand analogs. Studies with hydrophobic alkane phase-selectively soluble polyisobutylene-bound dyes in different polar/non-polar solvent mixtures showed that the leaching of the polymer-supported dye into the polar phase could be significantly decreased by the use of polymer cosolvents. UV-Visible spectroscopy studies showed that both polymeric additives and changes in the nature of the alkane cosolvent contribute to the desired anti-leaching effects in these biphasic systems.

Phase-selective studies of polyisobutylene-bound dyes using antileaching agents

249th National Meeting (2015)

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