Polymer-anchoring Schiff base ligands and their metal complexes: Investigation of their electrochemical, photoluminescence, thermal and catalytic properties

Abstract

In this study, we prepared three polymer-anchored Schiff base ligands and their Cu(II), Co(II) and Ni(II) transition metal complexes. For this purpose, we synthesized three Schiff base ligands from the reaction of 2,4-dihydroxybenzaldehyde with diamines in the ethanol solution and characterized by the analytical and spectroscopic methods. We investigated the electrochemical and photophysical properties of the free Schiff base ligands in different solvents and concentrations. In the electrochemical studies, we found that the ligands show the reversible and irreversible redox processes. In order to obtain the polymer-anchored ligands, we used Merrifield’s peptide resin (PS) as solid support. The surface morphologies of the polymer anchored Schiff base ligands were done with the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). We did alkene epoxidation and alkane oxidation reactions of the metal complexes and used the cyclohexene, styrene, cyclohexane and cyclooctane as the substrate and they show the low catalytic activity. The metal complexes have no selectivity in the oxidation reactions. The polymer anchored Schiff base ligands and their metal complexes have high thermal stability at the higher temperatures.