Glucose esters as biobased PVC plasticizers

Abstract

Utilization of glucose, produced by liquefaction of cellulose or other abundant biomass sources, as raw material for production of green plasticizers would offer an attractive alternative to traditional phthalate plasticizers. Three glucose hexanoate esters (GHs) were synthesized by one-step reaction and evaluated as green plasticizers for poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC). The esterification was carried out for three different time periods to obtain plasticizers with different number of hexanoate groups, as the degree of substitution could influence the miscibility between PVC and GHs. A fast and powerful laser desorption ionization-mass spectrometry (LDI-MS) method was developed to obtain molecular level structural information of the plasticizer structures. All the GHs showed good miscibility with PVC and the GH blends exhibited better mechanical properties, in the form of higher strain at break and lower modulus, as compared to glucose pentaacetate (GPA) and sucrose octaacetate (SOA) blends that were studied in comparison. Altogether the results indicate that the synthesized glucose esters have large potential as green PVC plasticizers and they could be a promising option to overcome the environmental problems caused by phthalate plasticizers.