Abstract
The growing ethanol production around the world demands more value-added applications for its main byproduct, distillers grains. The present work reports the study of using corn based distillers dried grains (DDG) as biofillers for biobased epoxy resin and the mechanical, physical and thermal properties of the composites. The biobased epoxy resin is the blend of diglycidylether of bisphenol-A based resin and epoxidized soybean oil. The incorporation of DDG into the biobased resin accelerated the curing process as evident from the differential scanning calorimetry and temperature-modulated Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The 40 wt% DDG filled composite showed an excellent retention of flexural strength of up to 94 % of that of the neat epoxy. Furthermore, the composite filled with the DDG treated with epoxy functionalized oligomeric silsesquioxane showed even better flexural properties thanks to the improved wettability of the biobased resin with the filler. Dynamic mechanical analysis showed a 12 % increment in storage modulus for the surface-treated DDG composites over the biobased resin. The improved interfacial adhesion between the DDG and matrix through the surface modification was also observed in the morphological characterization with electron microscope. The study demonstrates the viability of combining DDG biofiller with the epoxy bioresin to produce novel biomaterials at low cost.
Highlights
The limited fossil reserves have compelled the industrial and scientific communities to explore using renewable resources to reduce our dependence on petroleum
The epoxy resin is cured by the reaction between the epoxy rings and the cyclic anhydrides at elevated temperatures
The present work shows the successful fabrication of dried grains (DDG) filled biobased epoxy composites with mechanical properties similar to those of the neat polymer
Summary
The limited fossil reserves have compelled the industrial and scientific communities to explore using renewable resources to reduce our dependence on petroleum. The production of corn-based bioethanol as a renewable fuel is growing rapidly throughout the world. In 2014 alone, the worldwide production of ethanol was about 25 billion gallons, of which over 14 billion gallons were produced by. In North America, the vast majority of ethanol is produced from corn. Two different methods are used to produce ethanol from corn, namely dry milling and wet milling [2]. The dry milling process produces a large amount of distillers grains as co-product. 1 kg of corn produces 1/3 kg of each of ethanol, distillers grains and carbon dioxide [4]. In North America, the DDGS production has increased by 260 % from 2005 to 2010 [6]. Several attempts have been made to find value-added applications of DDGS including extraction of protein and cellulose from DDGS [7, 8] and using DDGS as biofiller for resins [3, 4], thermoplastics [5, 9, 10], and biocomposites [2, 11]
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