Abstract: The applications of molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) in synthesis and catalysis are being increasingly investigated. Conventional bulk polymerization often produce the polymer materials exhibiting low binding capacity, binding sites heterogeneity, and poor site accessibility. The use of nano-sized MIPs is expected to overcome these problems because nano-sized materials have a small dimension with high surface-to-volume ratio. The objective of this study is to construction molecular imprinting microreactor (MIM) in nanomaterials. In the first step, alkenyl multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) were prepared by esterification reaction of hydroxyl group of MWNTs and methacryloyl chloride. Then, the molecular imprinted catalyst for Diels-Alder cycloaddition was fabricated on MWNTs by using alkenyl-MWNTs as matrix, Diels-Alder cycloaddition product of anthracene and maleic acid as template molecule, methacrylic acid (MAA) and ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EDMA) as functional monomer and cross-linker, respectively. The molecular imprinted catalyst exhibited catalytic activity for the cycloaddition reaction of anthracene and maleic acid. Compared with the uncatalyzed reaction, a rate enhancement of 1.77 fold was obtained. Plots of initial velocities of the cycloaddition versus substrate concentration showed typical Michaelis-Menten kinetics. In addition, the Michaelis constant (KM) and maximal rate (vmax) were calculated from Lineweaver-Burk plots to be 17735.24 umolL-1 and 0.713 umolL-1S-1, respectively.

Key words: Molecular imprinting microreactor, Multiwalled carbon nanotubes, Diels-Alder cycloaddition, Catalysis