Journal of the American Chemical Society, Vol.142, No.13, 5969-5973, 2020
Compounded Sequence Control in Polymerization of One-Pot Mixtures of Highly Reactive Acrylates by Differentiating Lewis Pairs
The ability to synthesize well-defined block copolymers (BCPs) from one-pot comonomer mixtures has powerful chemical and practical implications. However, controlling sequences between highly reactive, homologous comonomers such as acrylates during polymerization is challenging. Here we present a Lewis pair polymerization strategy that uniquely utilizes preferential Lewis acid coordination to differentiate between comonomers, distinctive kinetics, and compounded thermodynamic and kinetic differentiation to precisely control sequences and suppress tapering and misincorporation errors, thus achieving well-defined and resolved di- or tri-BCPs of acrylates.