Plant oil-derived copolymers with remarkable post-polymerization induced mechanical enhancement for high performance coating applications

Polymer coatings have been heavily utilized in many industrial and civil applications where a protective thermoset material with enhanced properties such as chemical and physical resistance, thermal stability, and tailorable mechanical properties is desired. Plant oils are a class of promising biomass toward sustainable polymers, but have yet to be fully harnessed in tailorable thermoset coatings due to the challenging functionalization and extensive crosslinking processes required to achieve desirable thermomechanical properties. In this work, we demonstrated that soybean methacrylate (SBMA) from high oleic soybean oil (HOSO) can be utilized to produce bio-based acrylic thermoset copolymers through an industrially viable semi-batch emulsion polymerization process with various commonly used co-monomers such as methyl methacrylate, styrene, and butyl acrylate. A wide range of monomer feed ratios with SBMA from 0 to 50 wt% was easily achieved with minimal modifications allowing for good tunability of thermal and mechanical properties in the prepared latexes. More importantly, a simple and effective auto-oxidative crosslinking of the latex films provided extreme mechanical enhancements making these thermosets good candidates in ultra-strong, ultra-tough, and high Tg coating applications.