Synthetic polymers, predominantly petroleum based at present, are essential to virtually all aspects of modern life and the global economy.  However, as petroleum resources continue to be depleted, an imminent challenge exists to gradually replace petroleum-based building block monomers and polymers with those derived from renewable resources in a technologically and economically competitive fashion.  In this context, this presentation will focus on the synthesis and properties of two classes of sustainable polymers derived from naturally occurring or biomass-derived renewable feedstocks.  The first class is furanic network polymers, produced from furan-containing acrylics and polyols via either chain-growth or step-growth polymerization, followed by cross-linking.  The second class is high-performance acrylic bioplastics, produced from biomass-derived a-methylene-?-(methyl)butyrolactones via either metal-mediated stereospecific coordination polymerization or rapid organocatalytic addition polymerization.

Furanic network polymers and high-performance acrylic bioplastics

247th National Meeting (2014)

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