Mesoporous zeolite SBA-15 supported nickel diimine catalysts for ethylene polymerization

The novel mesoporous zeolite SBA-15 is successfully used as the support to immobilize late-transition metal nickel diimine catalyst, both in physical and chemical methods, EA, ICP, FT-IR and XRD are applied to characterizing these supported catalysts. The results of ethylene polymerization reveal that these supported catalysts have high catalytic activity as their homogenous counterpart does, moreover, polyethylene with a fibrous morphology is pro-duced due to the channel effect of support, and both the molecular weight and molecular weight distributions of polymers are increased greatly.