Research
The use of plant oils as a renewable feedstock is a challenging opportunity that might allow the substitution of existing fossil oil based processes.
This approach is not only environmentally friendly (green chemistry), since the synthetic potential of nature is exploited in a efficient manner, but will simply be necessary in a few decades since our fossil resources are depleting at a high rate.
The chemistry of plant oil derived fatty acids can be quite rich, since a large variety of different functionalities, chain lengths and number of double bonds are naturally available from these renewable resources, as shown below.
We use these (and other, such as terpenes or cellulose) renewable feedstocks for the preparation of (novel) monomers and subsequently study their polymerization (both step-growth and chain growth procedures are investigated) in order to obtain renewable polymers of all kinds (including, e.g., polyolefin analogues, polyamides, polyesters, polyanhydrides, polyurethanes, and others).
Moreover, we investigate efficient catalytic approaches, such as olefin (cross)-metathesis, for the preparation of novel monomers as well as for the post-polymerization functionalization of the obtained polymeric materials.
Please see the publication pages for a detailed description of our most recent research projects.