Polyurethanes from Vegetable Oils

TLDR

Vegetable oils are renewable raw materials that are excellent yet highly heterogeneous for producing polyols and polyurethanes. This review examines how the structural characteristics of vegetable oils influence the resulting polyols and polyurethanes. The review details polyol synthesis routes—direct oxidation, epoxidation with ring opening, hydroformylation, ozonolysis, and transesterification—followed by the fabrication of rigid and flexible foams, the structure–property relationships of polyurethanes from various polyols, isocyanates, and crosslinking degrees, and evaluates environmental aspects such as thermal and hydrolytic stability and biodegradability. Keywords: soy‑polyol‑polyurethane networks structure; acknowledgments to Dr.

Abstract

Vegetable oils are excellent but very heterogeneous renewable raw materials for polyols and polyurethanes. This review discusses the specific nature of vegetable oils and the effect of their structures on the structure of polyols and polyurethanes. One section is dedicated to polyols for rigid and flexible foams and methods of their preparation such as direct oxidation of oils, epoxidation followed by ring opening, hydroformylation, ozonolysis, and transesterification. The next section deals with preparation and structure‐property relationships in polyurethanes from different groups of polyols, different isocyanates, and different degrees of crosslinking. The final section covers the environmental aspects of bio‐based polyurethanes, i.e., thermal stability, hydrolytic stability, and some aspects of biodegradability. Keywords: soy‐polyolpolyurethanenetworksstructure Acknowledgment I am indebted to Dr. Ivan Javni, Dr. Andrew Guo, Dr. Mihail Ionescu, Alisa Zlatanic, Wei Zhang, Dr. Yijin Xu and staff and students at Pittsburg State University for the experimental work reviewed in this paper.