Despite many significant advancements during past few decades in the field of polymeric materials to improve their performance and environmental footprint, our heavy dependence on petrochemical resources make them unsustainable for future development. Bio-based materials, such as plant oils, are important resources and sustainable alternatives to petroleum-derived materials. Their unique chemical structure and functionality provide opportunities to derive functional building blocks for polymeric materials such as coatings, adhesives and composites. Using principles of green chemistry and engineering, our research group has designed and developed a platform of soybean oil-based functional building blocks for their use in advanced coatings such as water-borne, high-solids and UV-curable systems. These �green� soy-based building blocks promise effective replacement of petro-based products in the current industrial coating formulation, while maintaining equal or better performance attributes.A family of hyper-branched soy-polyols having different chemical structures, morphology, functionality, and functional group contents has been developed from epoxidized soybean oil. Specifically, soy-oligomers with �hydroxyl, -isocyanate, -acrylic and �silane functionality have been prepared and characterized. UV-curable aqueous polyurethane dispersions with excellent balance of mechanical properties have been derived using soy-polyols and acrylated soy-polyols as primary components. High-solid moisture-cured urethane coatings have been developed from hyper-branched soy-polyols prepared by Michael-addition reaction of acrylated epoxidized soybean oil and N,N-Diethanolamine, showed excellent mechanical and chemical resistance properties suitable for a number of protective coating applications. This study clearly demonstrates that these functional soy-building blocks with high bio-renewable contents have myriads of potential commercial applications.

Bio-based functional building blocks for sustainable and advanced coatings

248th National Meeting (2014)

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