TABLE OF CONTENTS Organometallic compounds have come to occupy a position of prominence in the last 50 years. Although the first organometallic compound is traditionally regarded as Zeise's salt, K[PtCl 3CH 2=CH 2], the major impetus to this field is undoubtedly the discovery of ferrocene in the 1950's. This was followed by the landmark finding of Ziegler that organoaluminum compounds can function as catalysts towards the polymerization of ethylene. Later work showed that organoaluminum compounds in conjunction with titanium halides can be used for the preparation of high density polyethylene and isotactic polypropylene. As we had seen in Chap. 2 various developments in Ziegler-Natta catalysis have occurred since the original discovery. Historically the importance of Ziegler-Natta catalysts has been to move organometallic compounds from being laboratory curiosities to become industrially important compounds. Many other amazing developments have occurred in the field of organometallic chemistry and many textbooks deal with this subject [ [1] [2]]. In this chapter we will have a brief survey of polymers that incorporate organometallic fragments in their back-bone. Major motivations for attempts to prepare polymers that contain metals in the backbone are as follows:
The difficulty of assembling metal-containing polymers has been and continues to be a synthetic challenge. The process of attempting to prepare these polymers has led to a number of novel preparative routes.
The expectation that some members of this polymer family may have unusual electrical, magnetic or optical properties has also been a major motivation for studying these polymer...
