writer：Wei Zhao, Dongmei Cui, Xinli Liu, and Xuesi Chen
keywords：metathesis reaction; ring-opening polymerization; polylactides; heterotactic
source：期刊
specific source：http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ma101202g
Issue time：2010年

Triethanolamine (TEA) reacted with 3 equiv of yttrium alkyl complex 1 bearing O,N,N,Otetradentate Salan ligand to give a trinuclear yttrium alkoxide counterpart 2 via metathesis reaction. Complex 2 initiated the ring-opening polymerization of rac-lactide in a livingness mode under mild conditions. Remarkably, 2 was so tolerant of the protic TEA that under various TEA-to-yttrium molar ratios ranging from 1:3 up to 81:1, the polymerization performed smoothly, suggesting an immortal characteristic. The resultant polylactides had variable molecular weights (Mn = 1.36  104 to 32.54  104 ) but narrow molecular weight distributions (PDI = 1.02-1.09), and, especially, pure heterotactic (Pr = 0.99), hydroxyl-functionalized and star-shaped architecture, which were fully characterized by NMR spectroscopy and MALDI-TOF mass spectrum analyses and confirmed further by calculating the contraction factor value g0 (g0 = 0.96) via Mark-Houwink equations. Detailed investigation of the “immortal” polymerization gave a unique kinetics law of -d[LA]/dt = kp[LA][TEA]-0.352.