On the road to a more natural finish Partially plant-based polymers evaluated in exterior and furniture coatings.

摘要

This article is reproduced from EUROPEAN COATINGS JOURNAL,April 2018.Several plant-based alternatives to fossil fuel-based(meth)acrylate monomers are described.Both exterior wood finishes and furniture finishes using binders containing 40% plant-derived carbon showed performance at least equal to that of the fossil-based control formulations.Polymeric binders containing(meth)acrylic copolymers have long been used in the coatings market.With increasing awareness of the earth's depleting natural resources and climate changes,there is growing pressure on industry to find plant-based alternatives for its raw materials.Since the turn of the century,much research has been done to develop renewable alternatives to current polymers as used in paints and coatings.Most of this research has been aimed at using vegetable oils or sugars,and modifying wood structures to obtain lignin structures'11.Although polymers obtained like this have their merits,they do not provide alternatives for modern coatings used in,for instance,the interior furniture or exterior industrial wood markets.Renewable monomers that do provide a means of producing(partially)plant-based polymer binders for use in paints and coatings have been suggested using various approaches'21,but so far,no commercial plantbased binders based on these monomers have been reported.In this study,it will be shown that it is currently feasible to produce partially plant-based polymer binders via emulsion polymerisation for use in industrial paints or coatings for wood.Following an overview of the various plant-based monomers available,some paints prepared from partially plant-based polymer compositions will be compared with their fossil fuel alternatives.For the sake of this study,polymer synthesis was restricted to emulsion polymerisation.Many detailed overviews of this technology have been published over the years.