Robust, Fire-Safe, Monomer-Recovery, Highly Malleable Thermosets from Renewable Bioresources

By Sheng Wang, Songqi Ma, Qiong Li, Wangchao Yuan, Binbo Wang, Jin Zhu. Macromolecules, 2018

310 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Conventional thermosets are built by nonrenewable fossil resources and are arduous to be reprocessed, recycled, and reshaped due to their permanent covalent cross-linking, and their flammability makes them unsafe during use. Here, for the first time, we synthesized a novel Schiff base precursor from abundant and renewable lignin derivative vanillin and produced malleable thermosets (Schiff base covalent adaptable networks (CANs)) combining high performance, super-rapid reprocessability, excellent monomer recovery, and arbitrary permanent shape changeability as well as outstanding fire resistance. The Schiff base CANs exhibited high glass transition temperatures of ∼178 °C, tensile strength of ∼69 MPa, tensile modulus of ∼1925 MPa, excellent flame retardancy with UL-94 V0 rating and V1 rating, and high LOI of ∼30%. Meanwhile, three Schiff base CANs showed high malleability with the activation energy of the bond exchange of 49–81 kJ mol–1 and could be reprocessed in 2–10 min at 180 °C. These Schiff base CAN...

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d7b42535f97a15c3878ed2c19bd885f62538bafc