A high-throughput approach towards tailor-made water-soluble metallo-supramolecular polymers

Automated parallel synthesis and high-throughput screening has been proven to drastically speed up polymer and materials research. Here we present an automated parallel approach for investigation of the influences of different counter ions (chloride, bromide, acetate and sulfate) on the iron(II) mediated metallo-supramolecular polymerization of bis(2,2':6,'2"-terpyrid-4'-yl)-poly(ethylene oxide)(179). The synthesized polymers were characterized by H-1 NMR, UV-vis and IR. The degree of polymerization has been estimated on the basis of concentration dependent viscosity measurements. The conversion as well as the degree of polymerization followed the order: bromide, chloride > sulfate >> acetate.