Ethylene Polymerizations Using Parallel Pressure Reactors and a Kinetic Analysis of Chain Transfer Polymerization.

We demonstrate a method for high-throughput catalyst screening using a parallel pressure reactor starting from the initial synthesis of a nickel α-diimine ethylene polymerization catalyst. Initial polymerizations with the catalyst lead to optimized reaction conditions, including catalyst concentration, ethylene pressure and reaction time. Using gas-uptake data for these reactions, a procedure to calculate the initial rate of propagation (kp) is presented. Using the optimized conditions, the ability of the nickel α-diimine polymerization catalyst to undergo chain transfer with diethylzinc (ZnEt2) during ethylene polymerization was investigated. A procedure to assess the ability of the catalyst to undergo chain transfer (from molecular weight and 13C NMR data), calculate the degree of chain transfer, and calculate chain transfer rates (ke) is presented.