Natural Oil Polyols - Sources of Natural Oil Polyols

Sources of Natural Oil Polyols

Ninety percent of the fatty acids that make up castor oil is ricinoleic acid, which has a hydroxyl group on C-12 and a carbon-carbon double bond. The structure below shows the major component of castor oil which is composed of the tri-ester of rincinoleic acid and glycerin:

Other vegetable oils - such as soy bean oil, peanut oil, and canola oil - contain carbon-carbon double bonds, but no hydroxyl groups. There are several processes used to introduce hydroxyl groups onto the carbon chain of the fatty acids, and most of these involve oxidation of the C-C double bond. Treatment of the vegetal oils with ozone cleaves the double bond, and esters or alcohols can be made, depending on the conditions used to process the ozonolysis product. The example below shows the reaction of triolein with ozone and ethylene glycol.

Air oxidation, (autoxidation), the chemistry involved in the "drying" of drying oils, gives increased molecular weight and introduces hydroxyl groups. The radical reactions involved in autoxidation can produce a complex mixture of crosslinked and oxidized triglycerides. Treatment of vegetable oils with peroxy acids gives epoxides which can be reacted with nucleophiles to give hydroxyl groups. This can be done as a one-step process. Note that in the example shown below only one of the three fatty acid chains is drawn fully, the other part of the molecule is represented by "R₁" and the nucleophile is unspecified. Earlier examples also include acid catalyzed ring opening of epoxidized soybean oil to make oleochemical polyols for polyurethane foams and acid catalyzed ring opening of soy fatty acid methyl esters with multifunctional polyols to form new polyols for casting resins.

Triglycerides of unsaturated (containing carbon-carbon double bonds) fatty acids or methyl esters of these acids, can be treated with carbon monoxide and hydrogen in the presence of a metal catalyst to add a -CHO (formyl) groups to the chain (hydroformylation reaction) followed by hydrogenation to give the needed hydroxyl groups. In this case R₁ can be the rest of the triglyceride, or a smaller group such as methyl (in which case the substrate would be similar to biodiesel). If R=Me then additional reactions like transesterification are needed to build up a polyol.