High-Throughput Synthesis of Support Materials for Olefin Polymerization Catalyst

Abstract

Rational catalyst design necessitates fundamental knowledge on the structure-performance relationship, while the synthetic throughput for heterogeneous Ziegler-Natta olefin polymerization catalysts has long prevented the acquisition of a statistical database. In this contribution, an in-house reactor system was developed to realize the parallel synthesis of support materials for Ziegler-Natta catalysts for the first time. The developed system enabled parallel synthesis of 24 magnesium ethoxide samples with excellent reproducibility and morphological control comparable to a conventional experiment. Our demonstration revealed that the generation of diverse particle characteristics could be achieved through the addition of a third component as a structural modulator, in which the in-house parallel reactor system combined with the first principle component analysis enabled fast screening of effective modulators.

Keywords: high-throughput synthesis; olefin polymerization; particle architecture; spherical support; structural modulator.