Multinuclear Metallocene-based Catalysts in Olefin Polymerization

During the last decades, multinuclear catalysts have captured the researcher's attention and also have shown impressive progress. The multinuclear catalysts such as metallocene-based complexes can be mono (homo) or multi (hetero) metallic(s). Albeit, reason and mechanism of the results from olefin polymerization and copolymerization in the presence of these catalysts are explained suggestively but a number of practical-theoretical studies confirmed cooperative effects between centers in relation to the structures. Among this class of catalysts, the sort of center and linkage are the main factors in comparison to their mononuclear analogs. Totally, the sort of catalyst center (active site), steric hindrance, electronic effects and inter-center distances can cause a variation in performance and catalyst behavior, producing polyolefin with different microstructure and properties. Moreover, such designed multinuclear structures exhibit the unprecedented levels of polyolefin branching, enhanced enchainment selectivity for functional and unfunctional α-olefin comonomers, enhanced polyolefin tacticity and molecular weight, modified chain transfer kinetics and LLDPE synthesis with a single binuclear catalyst and ethylene. In the following, diverse results of multinuclear metallocene-based catalysts are reported such as increasing or decreasing catalyst activity, average molecular weight, molecular weight distribution, stereospecific index, selectivity, content and type of branching or even maintaining catalytic and polymeric characteristics.