High-throughput screening in olefin-polymerization catalysis: from serendipitous discovery towards rational understanding.

High-throughput-screening (HTS) tools and methods are used more and more, especially in industry, in the search for new, selective organometallic catalysts. In most cases, the approach is, in essence, empirical, and the strategy is to increase the number of experiments that can be run at a given place in a given time. Highly miniaturized, parallel reaction setups have been implemented for the rapid assessment of whether novel catalysts resulting from the structural amplification of a basic framework are "good" or "bad" with respect to the properties of interest, and, depending on the response, worthy of a subsequent, more-careful evaluation. In this article, we demonstrate that it is possible to utilize these state-of-the-art HTS platforms with a different strategy: the rapid generation of reliable kinetic data for mechanistic studies in view of a thorough understanding and rational catalyst design. Ziegler-Natta-type catalytic olefin polymerization will be used throughout as an example.