Catalytic hydrolysis of epoxyfatty esters with solid sulfonic acids

Abstract

Four sulfonic resins are able to promote the hydrolysis of several epoxyfatty esters becoming a very interesting strategy to obtain polyols from epoxyfatty derivatives. The choice of the aqueous solvent and temperature is critical to improve the accessibility of reagents to the acidic catalytic sites. Tert-butanol/water mixture as solvent at 80 °C allows to obtain good results with all resins. The recovery of the heterogeneous catalyst during at least 11 reaction cycles avoids the drawbacks of the homogeneous ones including corrosion problems. In addition, this procedure can be applied to several epoxyfatty esters with different chain size, stereochemistry of the epoxide or with additional functionalities, obtaining good yields of structurally different polyols.