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 capability of nature is exploited in a efficient manner but will simply be necessary in a few decades since our fossil oil resources are depleting.
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 can be obtained from these renewable resources, as shown below.
We use these (and other) renewable feedstocks for the preparation of (novel) monomers and subsequently study their controlled/living polymerization in order to obtain (block) polymers of defined architecture, molecular weight, composition, polydispersity as well as end-group functionality.
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.