Propene/Ethene-[1-13C] copolymerization as a tool for investigating catalyst regioselectivity, 2 - The MgCl2/TiCl4-AlR3 system

The propene/ethene-[1-C-13] Copolymerization method has been applied to measure precisely the regioselectivity in propene polymerization of the "simple" MgCl2/TiCl4 catalyst (activated with Al((i)-Bu)(3)) which can be viewed as the ancestor of all present-day MgCl2-supported industrial catalysts containing Lewis bases as selective modifiers. It has been found that the average content of 2,1-regiomistakes in the polypropylene produced is fairly high (ca. 0.7 mol %), although-not unexpectedly, due to the multisite catalyst nature-these are distributed rather nonuniformly throughout the polymer. The difficulty in detecting the 2,1-units, despite their relatively high concentration, in the C-13 NMR spectra of homopolymer samples at natural C-13 abundance has been traced to their occurrence in a variety of stereochemical environments, which leads to splitting and broadening of the corresponding resonances. The fraction of "dormant" polypropylene chains with a 2,1-last-inserted unit was estimated to be in the 20-50% range. QM calculations of regioselectivity on classical Corradini-type models of epitactic octahedral catalytic Ti species turned out to be in basic agreement with the experiment.