Abstract: Polyimides have been widely used in aerospace and microelectronics due to their excellent mechanical properties and thermo oxidative stability^[1]. However, most of aromatic polyimides are severe difficult to process because of their bad solubility in common solvents and intractable in their fully imidized forms, which restrict their applications and developments^[2,3]. Therefore, many investigations were focused on improving the dissolvability of polyimides and it was found that the excellent solubilizing units could be obtained from substituted biphenyls^[4-7]. Biphenyltetracarboxylic dianhydrides(BPDAs) are the most important monomers for the synthesis of these compounds. Among them, the synthesis of 2,3,3′,4′-/3,3′,4,4′- biphenyltetracarboxylic dianhydride has been widely investigated, but only a few literatures reported the synthesis of 2,2′,3,3′-biphenyltetracarboxylic dianhydride(em-BPDA)^[8-10].

Key words: 2,2′,3,3′-Biphenyltetracarboxylic dianhydride, Nickel-catalyzed, Microwave synthesis