Nowadays, petrochemical industries are facing challenges in technical, economical, and environmental issues because the raw materials used, fossil fuels, are limited resources. Accordingly, the development of alternative renewable resources and effective synthetic pathways for their derivatives is one of the ongoing important global issues in petrochemical industries.Biomass, biological materials from living organisms, such as corn starch, sugarcane and vegetable oil, could be a proper solution as the alternative resource owing to their superior advantages over fossil fuels in terms of cost efficiency, renewability, flexibility, and eco-friendliness. Thus, there are increasing demands for the development of flexible and economical synthetic strategies for a variety of derivatives from one natural resource.In this report, we will present a divergent synthetic approach to obtain several monomers for thermoplastic elastomers (TPEs) from undecylenic acid that can be derived from pyrolysis of castor oil. TPEs have advantages of being both plastic and rubbery and are superior to either rubbers or plastics in some properties. We have prepared three ?-dicarboxylic acids and three ?-amino acids, respectively, with different chain lengths ranging from C10 to C12 in 64~94% yields from a common starting material, undecylenic acid.

Divergent synthetic approach for polyamide monomers from a natural resource, castor oil

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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