PREDICTION OF ACTIVITY AND PROPERTIES OF ZIRCONOCENE CATALYST FOR ETHYLENE AND 1-HEXENE COPOLYMERIZATION BY QSAR/QSPR MODELLING

Abstract

Quantitative structure-activity/property relationships (QSA/PR) methodology has been applied to explain the experimental data correlation of the structure related properties of zirconocene catalysts. The relationship between experimental ethylene and 1-hexene copolymerization activity of the series of zirconocene catalysts with different substitution patterns in the cyclopentadienyl and indenyl rings and physical properties were obtained. In this work, 3 sets of zirconocene catalyst consisting of 19 zirconocene complexes in total were used to build QSA/PR model. All zirconocene structures were optimized using the GGA-PW91 density functional theoretical method with DNP 3.5 basic set within DMol3 module of Materials Studio 5.5 program. Totally 33 properties related to the catalyst activity were calculated and fitted to QSA/PR model using the multiple linear regression (MLR) procedure. The good predictive ability of the models allows us to design better zirconocene catalyst for ethylene and 1-hexene copolymerization.