The goal of this project was to prepare chiral chelating ligands that could be coupled to a polyisobutylene (PIB). The product ligands and their metal complexes would then be phase separable, recoverable catalysts for organic reactions. These materials would be greener catalysts because PIB is a non-toxic, non-polar, commercially available polymer that is soluble in non-polar solvents such as heptane and insoluble in polar solvents such as dimethylformamide (DMF) or ethanol. While we did not complete the synthesis of the desired chiral Pybox ligands, we were able to prepare precursors that did have PIB groups attached. We were able to use these precursors to test the hypothesis that the PIB-bound species will be phase separable in thermomorphic solvent mixtures. These trace analyses used <sup>1</sup>H NMR spectroscopy, studying leaching of the ligand by comparing the intensity of ligand peaks to the <sup>13</sup>C satellite peaks for DMF and showed that leaching of ligands was ca. 10 wt% in a heptane/DMF mixture. Future studies will examine other solvent mixtures to further reduce this leaching and will include completion of the synthesis of the chiral Pybox ligands and catalysts.

PIB-bound pybox ligands

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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