Soybean and other vegetable oils, and their fatty acids, are attractive sources for polymers due to their worldwide availability, lack of toxicity and presence of convenient functional groups. A variety of routes can be employed for creating diverse polymeric materials from these sources.

This webinar will discuss the design of soybean-based polymers with well-defined molecular characteristics and competitive properties compared with conventional, petroleum-derived materials. Topics to be covered will include a diverse array of approaches using soybean oil and polymers. Among them are 1) tunable properties in thermoplastic elastomers derived from fatty acids; 2) vegetable oils as rubber-toughening additives for a biorenewable thermoplastic and polylactide; 3) hydrolytically degradable epoxy resins derived from epoxidized soybean oil; and 4) conversion into reaction intermediates, monomers and polymers for high-performance coatings and other applications.