The purpose of this study was to investigate the utilization of bio-oil obtained from hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) of loblolly pine for the synthesis of bio-based epoxy resin. In addition, the effect of ethanol, which is used as a co-solvent in the HTL process, on the properties of resulting bio-oil-based epoxy resin (BOBER) was studied for the first time. Quantitative <sup>31</sup>P-NMR analysis of HTL-bio-oil showed that addition of ethanol in HTL process resulted in increase in the concentration of aliphatic type OH groups. It was found that not only the total hydroxyl (OH) number of HTL-bio-oil had an effect on the yield and epoxy equivalent weight of BOBER, but the distribution of OH groups within bio-oil (aliphatic, phenolic and acidic OH) also played an important role for the determination of the optimum amount of catalyst to be used in the synthesis of BOBER. Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) analysis proved the self-curing phenomena of BOBER, and the activation energy for curing was calculated to be 95 – 98 kJ/mol, using Kissinger model of kinetic analysis. Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR) and curing kinetics analysis suggested that etherification reaction was the dominating reaction during the self-curing of BOBER. Glass transition temperature, crosslinking density, and the storage modulus of self-cured BOBER were calculated to be 63.6 – 96 °C, 8.5 – 58.7 mol/m<sup>3</sup>, and 425 – 845 MPa, respectively, using Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA). The BOBER system developed in this study provided promising results to replace HTL-bio-oil with the petroleum-based phenolic resource for the synthesis of epoxy resins.

Synthesis and characterization of bio-oil-based self-curing epoxy resin

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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