Characterization of rapeseed oil based polyurethane foams modified with glycerol and cellulose

M. A. MOSIEWICKI; P. ROJEK; S. MICHAłOWSKI; M. I. ARANGUEN; A. PROCIAK

Ustroń

Congreso; Polyurethanes 2013 - new trends of development; 2013

Polyurethanes can offer an ample variety of properties that can be useful in diverse applications. Generally, the polyols used for their production are derived from the fuel indus-try [1]. The study of renewable natural products as an alternative source for raw materials in polymeric production has gained increasing interest due to aspects related with environmental care and sustainable development. In this sense, vegetable oils are quite interesting because of additional advantages of wide availability at comparative low cost. Oils consist of triglyceride molecules with three unsaturated fatty acid chains able to be reacted in order to obtain a prod-uct for the polymer industry [2]. Specifically, the reaction of the double bonds of triglycerides in order to incorporate hydroxyls groups by means of different reaction paths has been studied [3-5]. In one of the most reported methods, the carbon-carbon insaturations are reacted to in-troduce hydroxyl groups through epoxidation with peroxiacids followed by oxirane ring-opening with different alcohols like diethylenglycol [5]. The structure of the resulting oil based polyol depends on the chemical modification method and the chosen vegetable oil (dis-tribution and position of the carbon-carbon double bond in the fatty acid chain). The aim of this work is to obtain rapeseed oil based polyurethane rigid foams using glycerol as a reactive modifier in order to increase stiffness and water as the reactive blowing agent. The effect of the addition of low concentrations of microcellulose to the foams was also evaluated.