CHAPTER 3: Preparation of Bio-polymers from Plant Oils in Green Media

The use of plant oils as starting materials to prepare polymers has attracted renewed attention in recent years to replace or augment traditional petrochemical-based polymers and resins. This is because of concerns for the environment, waste disposal, and depletion of fossil and non-renewable feedstocks. In this chapter we summarized the work in our laboratory on vegetable-oil-based materials. Mainly we focus on the polymerization of soybean oil (SBO), epoxidized soybean oil (ESO), and euphorbia oil (EuO) in carbon dioxide media (subcritical and supercritical conditions) catalyzed by Lewis acids. The molecular structures of SBO, ESO and EuO affected the polymerization. It is shown that epoxidized plant oils are easier to polymerize than SBO. The resulting polymers were characterized by FT-IR, ¹H-NMR, ¹³C-NMR and solid-state ¹³C-NMR spectroscopies, differential scanning calorimetry, thermogravimetric analysis, and gel permeation chromatography. Epoxidized soybean oil polymer (RPESO) was converted into HPESO polysoaps through saponification. We show that HPESO polysoaps are effective at lowering the surface tension of water and the interfacial tension of water–hexadecane and that they display minimum values in the range of 20–24 and 12–17 dyn cm⁻¹, respectively at concentration of 200–250 μM.