Strong influences of cocatalyst on ethylene/propylene copolymerization with a MgCl2/SiO2/TiCl4/diester type Ziegler–Natta catalyst

Using triethylaluminum (TEA), triisobutylaluminum (TIBA) or TEA/TIBA mixtures of molar ratio 75/25, 50/50 and 25/75 as the cocatalyst, five different ethylene–propylene copolymer samples were synthesized by a MgCl2/SiO2/TiCl4/diester type Ziegler–Natta catalyst in a slurry polymerization process. The synthesized copolymers are strongly heterogeneous in chain structure and were fractionated into part of nearly random copolymer and part of segmented copolymer. Both polymerization activity and copolymer structure were found to be markedly changed when the cocatalyst was changed from TEA to TEA/TIBA mixtures or pure TIBA. As the content of TEA in cocatalyst increases, yield of the random part of product increases and the yield of the crystalline segmented copolymer part decreases. There is also a decrease in ethylene content of the whole product with increasing TEA amount. Copolymerization behaviors of the TEA/TIBA mixture activated catalysis systems are not simple superposition of those activated by pure TEA and TIBA. When a 50/50 TEA/TIBA mixture was used as cocatalyst, the copolymerization activity became the highest, and yields of both the random copolymer part and the segmented copolymer part are close to the highest level. On the other hand, both parts of the copolymer produced with a 50/50 TEA/TIBA mixture are relatively more blocky than the products of TEA or TIBA systems, and difference in ethylene content between the random part and the segmented part was the smallest. The segmented copolymer part of three typical samples was further fractionated by temperature-gradient extraction fractionation into fractions of different ethylene content and sequence distribution. Changing TEA content in the cocatalyst exerted strong influences also on the fraction distribution of the segmented part of copolymer.