Polymeric materials are mainly derived from petroleum feed-stocks. With the petroleum production facing exhaustion day by day, the use of renewable plant based feed-stocks for making polymers offer both economic and environmental advantages. Thermosetting materials are highly cross-linked polymers that are cured or set using heat, or heat and pressure, and/or light irradiation. Among the renewable resources that can be used to prepare thermosetting polymers, the Cashew nut shell liquid (CNSL) is an important one due to its composition of phenolic compounds that offer many routes for chemical modification. The main component of thermally treated CNSL is cardanol which is a phenol derivative mainly having a meta substituent of a C15 unsaturated hydrocarbon chain with one to three double bonds. In this study a commercially available epoxy cardanol (LITE 2513HP) was subjected to epoxidation reaction from the unsaturation sites on the side chain in the presence of formic acid and hydrogen peroxide. The reaction was carried out at 40 <sup>o</sup>C for 24 hours in toluene as inert carrier solvent for better heat dissipation. The structure of synthesized side chain epoxidized cardanol (SCEL) was confirmed with proton nuclear magnetic resonance (<sup>1</sup>H-NMR), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) together with epoxy equivalent weight (EEW) titrations and viscosity measurements. Synthesized side chain epoxidized epoxy cardanol resin was cured with petroleum based curing agents 4-4’=methylene biscyclohexanamine (PACM), and diethylenetriamine (DETA); and cardanol based epoxy hardeners with commercial names NX2003 and LITE2002. Also for comparison, NC514 which is a cardanol based bis-phenol type di epoxy and DGEBA (EPON828) which is a petroleum based commercial epoxy resin were thermally cured with listed epoxy hardeners at stoichiometry. Extent of curing reaction and curing mechanism of epoxy/amine systems were explored via mid-IR techniques and differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) respectively. Thermo-mechanical and thermal properties of the cured polymers of complete and partial cardanol based epoxy/amine systems were evaluated via dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) and thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) respectively and compared with those complete petroleum based epoxy/amine systems.

Synthesis and characterization of cardanol-based epoxy/amine systems

251st National Meeting (2016)

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