Tadatomi Nishikubo and Atsushi Kameyama
Department of Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering, Kanagawa University
Rokkakubashi, Kanagawa-ku, Yokohama, 221-8686 Japan
The addition reaction and the ring-opening polymerization of oxiranes are well known, and these reactions have been applied as thermal curing reaction of epoxy resins with certain reagents such as poly-functional carboxylic acids, phenols and amines, and using appropriate catalysts such as tert-amines, imidazoles and Lewis acids. These reaction systems have been widely used for adhesives, coatings, and composites in industry. Pendant epoxide groups in polymers have also been used as reactive groups for the synthesis of various functional polymers. On the other hand, oxetanes have similar strain energy as oxiranes. However, no other successful reactions of oxetanes have been reported in the field of organic chemistry and polymer synthesis excepting the ring-opening polymerization using cationic or coordinate catalysts.
The authors found recently many new reactions1-3 of oxetanes with certain reagents such as acyl chlorides, silyl chlorides, active esters, phenols, and carboxylic acids. These new organic reactions can be applied widely to polymer syntheses (Scheme 1). More recently, we also found4 anionic ring-opening polymerization of oxetanes and alternating ring-opening copolymerization of oxetanes with cyclic carboxylic anhydrides. In this paper, we would like to introduce new polymer syntheses based on the oxetane chemistry. Furthermore, we applied these reaction systems for the synthesis of new photocurable materials and thermal curing reaction of oxetane resins.
论文来源：In Commemoration of The 50 Years of Polymer Education and Research at Peking University,May,2004
