Coles Stuart R, Barker Guy, Clark Andrew J, Kirwan Kerry, Jacobs Daniel, Makenji Kylash, Pink David
Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.
Macromol Biosci. 2008 Jun 11;8(6):526-32. doi: 10.1002/mabi.200700238.
The use of plant oils as industrial feedstocks can often be hampered by their lack of optimization towards a particular process, as well as their development being risky; growing suitable volumes of crops to test can take up to five years. To circumvent this, we aimed to discover a method that would mimic plant oil profiles in the laboratory, and show that they exhibited similar properties to the naturally grown plant oils in a given process. Using the synthesis of polyurethanes as an example, we have synthesized six different polymers and demonstrated that plant oils will produce polymers with similar physical properties to those oils mimicked in the laboratory. The use of this mimicking process can be extended to other types of polymers to obtain a method for predicting the properties of a given material based on the plant oil composition of a crop before it is grown in bulk.
植物油用作工业原料常常会受到阻碍，一方面是因为它们针对特定工艺缺乏优化，另一方面其开发存在风险；种植足够数量的作物用于测试可能需要长达五年的时间。为了规避这一问题，我们旨在探索一种能在实验室中模拟植物油特性的方法，并证明它们在特定工艺中展现出与天然种植的植物油相似的性能。以聚氨酯的合成为例，我们合成了六种不同的聚合物，并证明植物油能生产出与实验室中模拟的那些植物油具有相似物理性能的聚合物。这种模拟过程的应用可以扩展到其他类型的聚合物，从而获得一种在作物大规模种植之前，基于其植物油成分预测给定材料性能的方法。
