Preparation of novel microspherical MgCl2-based titanium catalyst for propylene polymerization

Lowering the particle size of support is one of methods to reduce breakage of supported catalyst during polymerization, which may cause serious problems for fine polymer particles from those broken catalysts. Microspheric MgCl2 support could be obtained by emulsion way, but we found that they easily aggregated after emulsification and they are difficult to keep good spherical morphology. Up until now, hardly paper on the morphology improvement of micro size supports has been published. With the addition of an amount of Poly(propylene glycol)(PPG), microspheric MgCl2 supports with good morphology were obtained. 1, 3, 15, 35, 80% PPG were added, respectively, and the results of SEM study on obtained particles showed that appropriate addition of PPG obviously improved the morphology of supports. The optimist dosage was 3% in our experiment and the activity of catalyst supported on obtained support was 32.3 kg PP/g cat h. The function of PPG was explored preliminarily. In spite of the improvement of morphology the activity of supported catalyst was decreased gradually compared to those without PPG. So the further XRD and IR analysis were carried out to find reasons. The results indicated that PPG might plug pores of support and interfere with the reaction between supports and TiCl4. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2008