The Poly(Metal Phosphinates)

Abstract

For about the past ten years the research efforts of my group at Pennsalt have been devoted to that class of coordination polymers containing coordinate covalent bonds in the backbone. Bailar had undertaken a program on such materials with emphasis on bis(chelating) groups a few years after I left Illinois. At the time we started thinking about coordination polymers at Pennsalt, then, the bis(chelate) approach was obviously in good hands, so we concentrated on simpler bridging groups. Our study was confined to an examination of one-, two-, and three-atom bridging groups, i.e., bridging groups in which the shortest path from one coordination center to the next contains one, two, and three atoms, respectively. This limitation was made in order to avoid, inasmuch as possible, systems in which competition between bridging and chelation might be a problem; for a group with two donor sites can in principle function in either way.