Microwave-Assisted Cationic Ring-Opening Polymerization of Cyclic Imino Ethers

Microwave-irradiation has become a common heat source in organic chemistry in the last decade. In recent years, polymer chemists also discovered the advances of microwave heating that include fast and efficient heating as well as the homogeneous heat profile and the easy access to pressurized reaction conditions. In this contribution, we report our investigations on the cationic ring-opening polymerization of 2-oxazolines that lead to a tremendous acceleration from several days to several minutes polymerization time. In addition, the optimized microwave-assisted polymerization procedure was applied for the preparation of libraries of diblock and triblock copolymers that were used for the determination of structure-property relationships in poly(2-oxazoline)s.