Abstract
Owed to current environmental concerns and crude oil price fluctuations, the design of feasible substitutes to petroleum-based polymeric materials is a major challenge. A lot of effort has been focused on transforming natural vegetable oils (VOs), which are inexpensive, abundant, and sustainable, into polymeric materials. Different nanofillers have been combined with these bio-based polymer matrices to improve their thermal, mechanical, and antibacterial properties. The development of multifunctional nanocomposites materials facilitates their application in novel areas such as sensors, medical devices, coatings, paints, adhesives, food packaging, and other industrial appliances. In this work, a brief description of current literature on polymeric nanocomposites from vegetable oils reinforced with carbon nanomaterials is provided, in terms of preparation, and properties. Different strategies to improve the nanomaterial state of dispersion within the biopolymer matrix are discussed, and a correlation between structure and properties is given. In particular, the mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties of these natural polymers can be considerably enhanced through the addition of small quantities of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs), multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), graphene (G), or its derivatives such as graphene oxide (GO) or fullerenes (C60). Finally, some current and potential future applications of these materials in diverse fields are briefly discussed.
Highlights
Thermosetting polymers are insoluble polymeric materials that form a 3D network upon curing so that their properties can be tuned by adjusting the crosslink density
Strong efforts have been devoted towards the development of sustainable, safe, and environmentally friendly plastics from renewable resources
A variety of starting materials including polysaccharides, vegetable oils (VOs), lignin, pine resin derivatives, and proteins, have been used to synthesize renewable polymeric materials [3,4] Among these, VOs, which are esters formed between glycerol and three fatty acids, are the most widely used due to their inherent biodegradability, easy availability, low toxicity, and relatively low price [5]
Summary
Thermosetting polymers are insoluble polymeric materials that form a 3D network upon curing so that their properties can be tuned by adjusting the crosslink density. Polymers derived from VOs typically show poor mechanical and barrier properties, including brittleness, high gas and vapor permeability, and low heat distortion temperature, which limits their real applications [2]. To address these issues, different approaches have been described, such as mixing with other polymers [7], incorporating nanofillers [8,9,10,11], or the plasma treatment of the VOs or the carbon nanomaterials [8,9], which leads to bio-nanocomposites with improved performance. The idea is to provide a brief overview of the current state-of-art in this arena, in order to encourage additional research on the design and manufacturing of this type of green nanocomposites
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