Plant oil-based branched polymer coatings enhanced with nucleobases for achieving strong adhesion and outstanding environmental tolerance

Abstract

Plant oils as the most typical and widest available biomass feedstocks have been employed to construct organic coatings. In contrast to the conventional plant oil-based thermoset coatings, it is still challenging to fabricate robust supramolecular plant oil-based coatings with reversible and dynamic noncovalent interactions, overcoming the drawbacks of thermoset coatings. In this work, we have reported a series of strong nucleobase-enhanced plant oil-based coatings with multiple supramolecular interactions such as hydrogen bonding, π-π stacking, hydrophobic and coordination interactions. The nucleobase-functionalized supramolecular plant oil-based coatings display strong adhesion and outstanding environmental tolerance towards different pH conditions, the variation of temperatures, and UV irradiation. In order to optimize the polymerization of the plant oil-based monomer, the radical polymerization of methacrylate-type camellia oil monomer (MCO) was studied to understand the influence of the unsaturated carbon–carbon double bond in the appended long fatty chain on the polymerization of the methacrylate. The stable propagation radicals of methacrylate-type monomer result in the formation of branched plant oil-based polymers with high efficacy. The copolymerization of the plant oil-based and nucleobase-functionalized methacrylates and the supramolecular mixing achieves the maximum adhesion of 9.89 MPa, highlighting the potential of fabricating strong supramolecular plant oil-based coatings.