Aspects of Homogeneous Catalysis

The literature contains tens of thousands of publications and patents devoted to the synthesis, characterization and processing of polymers. Despite the fact that there are more than one hundred elements, the majority of these publications and patents concern polymers with carbon backbones. Furthermore, the limited (by comparison) number of publications on polymers that contain elements other than carbon in their backbones are typically devoted to polymers based on silicon, especially those with Si-O bonds. This disparity is partially a consequence of the dearth of low cost organometallic feedstock chemicals potentially useful for polymer synthesis. It also derives from the lack of general synthetic techniques for the preparation of organometallic polymers. That is, by comparison with the numerous synthetic strategies available for the preparation of organic polymers, there are few such strategies available for synthesizing tractable, organometallic polymers. In recent years, commerical and military performance requirements have begun to challenge the performance limits of organic polymers. As such, researchers have turned to organometallic polymers as a possible means of exceeding these limits for a wide range of applications that include: (1) microelectronics processing (e.g. photoresists) [1]; (2) light weight batteries (conductors and semi-conductors) [2]; (3) non-linear optical devices [3] and, (4) high temperature structural materials (e.g. ceramic fiber processing) [4,5].