Purpose

Relatively little work has been carried out on using natural oils in plastics. Larock and Gallagher will, with this project, seek to develop new and improved uses for corn and soybeans in the creation of new plastic compounds.

The plastics industry produces over 60 billion pounds of primarily petroleum-based plastics each year. There is a tremendous need for new materials with properties comparable to or better than those of current materials that might be prepared from renewable natural resources.

The Larock group is presently developing novel polymeric materials ranging from elastomers to tough, hard plastics by the cationic, free radical and thermal copolymerization of natural oils, like soy, corn, tung, and fish oils., and readily available comonomers already used in the plastics industry. These materials have excellent thermal and mechanical properties, including outstanding damping and shape memory properties that petroleum-based plastics do not possess.

One difficulty with the present process is that an expensive crosslinking agent, divinylbenzene (DVD) is needed in order to provide stronger materials. One of the most promising ways to improve the strength of the current materials without adding an expensive crosslinking agent is to use inexpensive fillers to generate composites. Many low cost fillers (from corn and soy) actually improve the material properties.

The major purpose of this project is, therefore, the development of soy/corn oil plastic composites and an examination of their properties.

Research Plan

The oils to be investigated are regular, low saturation and conjugated low saturation soy, and regular and conjugated corn oils. The low saturation soil oil is commercially available. The research group has already found that all of these oils will produce viable plastics using cationic procedures. Because the cationic polymerization of soy/corn oils has been thoroughly investigated and preliminary work carried out on cationic soy composites, initial efforts will focus on soy/corn plastic composites prepared by cationic polymerization. Composites will include:

1. Glass fiber-reinforced soy composites
2. Glass fiber-reinforced corn composites
3. Soy/corn composites reinforced by other fillers:
   1. quasicrystal (complex metal alloys)-reinforced soy/corn composites;
   2. conductive carbon black-soy/corn composites;
   3. schist (pryolyzed oil shale)-reinforced soy/corn composites.
4. Soy/corn nanocomposities

Impact

The economic impact of the possible higher-percentage substitution of some 60 billion lbs.(per year) of synthetic (petroleum-based) polymers with soy and corn composites is staggering!

With the help of this research, soy/corn plastics can be made at a significantly lower cost than most petroleum-based resins using well established technology. Anticipated is that new, affordable polymer composites with industrially viable properties will be developed that should find wide utility as structural materials.

The thorough understanding of the relationship between composite and properties gained here will lay a firm foundation for scale-up, production, and application of these new composites. Goal is to convert soy/corn oils into higher value products and opening exciting new markets for these abundant, inexpensive oils.