Abstract
Two reaction pathways for synthesis of high molar mass (Mw above 50 000 g/mol) aliphatic-aromatic poly(ester-carbonate)s were elaborated. Simple organic carbonates such as dimethyl carbonate or propylene carbonate were used as carbonate linkage sources and dimethyl terephthalate as the precursor of ester linkages. 1,4-Butanediol, 1,5-pentanediol, 1,6-hexanediol and 1,10-decanediol were used as diol monomers. To adjust the carbonate units content in the copolymer, solid alkylene bis(methylcarbonate) was used as a semiproduct instead of volatile dimethyl carbonate. In case of usage propylene carbonate as a starting material the process can be carried out in one pot without the need for isolation of the semiproduct. The obtained copolymers based on 1,4-butanediol, containing ca. 50 mol.% of carbonate units exhibited better mechanical strength (37 MPa) than commercially available aliphatic-aromatic copolyester Ecoflex® keeping the thermal properties at the same level.
Highlights
Application of cheap and available carbon dioxide, directly or indirectly, as a monomer for polymer synthesis due to its inertness is a big challenge
It was revealed that it is more convenient to use for synthesis of polycarbonates containing more than 3 carbon atom between carbonate linkages, monomers based on CO2 such as alkylene carbonates (ethylene carbonate (EC) or propylene carbonate (PC)) or dimethyl carbonate (DMC) [9,10,11]
The main problem encountered in the synthesis of poly(ester-carbonate) from dimethyl carbonate was co-distillation of the starting material with the by-product which distorts the molar ratio of the desired monomers
Summary
Application of cheap and available carbon dioxide, directly or indirectly, as a monomer for polymer synthesis due to its inertness is a big challenge. Another attractive polymers which contain built-in CO2 are poly(ester-carbonate)s. These copolymers can be obtained according to ring opening copolymerization or by polycondensation methods. Polymers obtained by polycondensation exhibit poor mechanical properties due to relatively small molar mass. To obtain high molar mass poly(ester-carbonate)s copolymerization of cyclic esters (L-lactide, ε-caprolactone) with cyclic carbonate monomer-trimethylene carbonate (TMC) is usually carried out [12,13,14]. Besides TMC for copolymerization with cyclic esters other six-membered cyclic carbonates with different functional groups are used [15,16,17,18]
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