Over the last years, benzoxazines gained a great interest due to their huge potential to overcome several short-comings of conventional phenolic resins while keeping clear assets. Indeed, their great thermal and mechanical properties, chemical resistance and fire retardancy are considered as promising advantages for the substitution of phenolic resins. Furthermore, a clear benefit of benzoxazine monomers is the versatility of their chemical design. Indeed, despite their good properties, the need of petroleum-based phenolic reagents traditionally for the synthesis of benzoxazine monomers is a strong drawback regarding the growing trend to producing environmentally friendly and high performance materials derived from renewable resources. To overcome this issue and due to the versatile chemical structure of benzoxazines, a large variety of naturally occurring phenolic compounds, such as cardanol or vanillin, are suitable for the synthesis of bio-based benzoxazine monomers. Nevertheless, the processability (melting end shaping) of majority of bio-based benzoxazine monomers are generally impeded by too high melting temperatures overlapping with the ring-opening polymerization onset. In order to tackle these issues, the present work relies an interesting approach for acting on benzoxazine monomers processing window that consist of an original and versatile synthesis of asymmetric di-functional benzoxazine monomers by the use of bio-based phenolic derivatives, cardanol together with vanillin. The resulting monomers exhibited large difference between melting and polymerization temperatures and an enhanced reactivity. The influence of the asymmetric chemical structure of this benzoxazine monomer on the thermal and mechanical properties of the resulting thermoset material will also be discussed.

Design of high performance thermosets asymmetric benzoxazines from lignin derivatives and vegetable oils

255th National Meeting (2018)

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