Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
in the last decade. This progress will undoubtedly continue for the coming
decades. We have witnessed numerous efforts in developing all kinds of
polymers such as polyurethanes, polyesters, polyamides, and epoxy resins as
well as various composites based on different plant oil resources. Plant oils
can be involved directly in the synthesis of polymeric materials, taking ad-
vantage of their own functionalities like double bonds, hydroxyl groups and
epoxy groups. Further modification of plant oils allows us to increase the
reactivity by introducing new functionalities. As a result, the modified plant
oils find themselves involved in all kinds of polymerization methods in-
cluding cationic polymerization, free-radical polymerization, ring-opening
polymerization, metathesis polymerization, condensation polymerization,
living polymerization and so on. The obtained polymeric materials thus have
applications such as coatings, adhesives, plasticizers and additives etc., with
comparable properties to their petroleum-based counterparts, providing us
with excellent candidates for the replacement of petroleum-based materials
in many fields.
Nonetheless, there are challenges to achieving these goals. Although fur-
ther efforts can be made to use plant oils directly for polymer synthesis, or to
develop more and more novel chemical modification methods on plant oils,
the utilization of plant oils or their derivatives has disadvantages due to their
complicated triglyceride structures and multiple functionalities, which
makes it dicult to control and tune the structures and properties of the
polymer products precisely. Thus a more favorable process would be to use
the plant oils as raw materials for developing traditional polymerizable
monomers. 10-Undecanoic acid from castor oil is one of the best examples of
this strategy. However, several criteria must be fulfilled for this strategy,
including developing highly ecient methods for converting plant oils to
monomers, which require not only mild conditions during the process but
also have high yields. Bio-transformation seems a promising method to
meet these criteria. The resulting monomers can be utilized for the synthesis
of polymers by traditional methods. Consequently, fully bio-based polymeric
materials could be developed.
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