New Catalysis Concept Obtains Polyester from Castor Oil
Scientists developed a new way of obtaining polyester from fats
and oils, more specifically, from castor oil.
Researchers at the University of Konstanz presented a new way of
obtaining polyester from fats and oils, more specifically, from castor oil. A
well-known and chemically established building block that can be obtained from
castor oil is Undecenol.
Konstanz/Germany — The development of future technologies that
are not based on mineral oil and can be used for producing chemicals and
plastics is one of the major tasks in modern materials science and a key
challenge that needs to be addressed if sustainable industrial production is to
have a future. A range of theoretical concepts and laboratory processes must be
devised and tested to resolve challenges and problems arising in connection
with the natural materials before potential applications for materials obtained
from renewable resources can be probed. One such concept has just been
described by Professor Stefan Mecking in a current study on obtaining polyester
from castor oil entitled “Synthetic Polyester from Plant Oil Feedstock by
Functionializing Polymerization” in the journal “Angewandte Chemie”.
With his colleague Dr. Ye Liu, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and the first author of
the study, Stefan Mecking developed the idea of interlinking many Undecenol
molecules to form one large molecule, a plastic molecule. They wanted the whole
process to be effective and readily accomplishable ‘in one go’. Undecenol has a
group of alcohols at one end of the molecule and a double bond at the other. It
was decisive to interlink these two groups to form an ester group in such a way
as to enable simultaneous linkage with long-chain molecules, i.e. plastics.
Such long-chain bonds are required to obtain the desired material properties.
One of the major general challenges in regard to these procedures is to
identify suitable catalysts. According to Stefan Mecking, they are especially
important because the reaction leading up to the formation of the desired
long-chain molecules must be incredibly effective and proceed without any
variance.
For the production of polyester as described in their study, the
chemists used carbonylation to obtain the ester groups. “The problem is that
Undecenol reacts with another smaller molecule, an aldehyde. If this happens,
it does not become part of the molecule chain, which means that it gets lost”,
says Stefan Mecking, summarizing the gist and great success of his research. By
using suitable catalysts, the researchers were able to prevent this loss and to
create polyester effectively. While developing the catalysts, they also worked
out the conceptual steps required for adjusting the melting point of the
products. Due to the insights they gained, they expect to be able to infer how
to handle the melting points of other long-chain substrates. This would allow
potential transfer applications of the concept for other renewable resources
that are even more readily available than castor oil.
Germany:
Green Chemistry 01/11/2019 | Alexander Stark
PROCESS WORLDWIDE
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