Versatile monomer platform for plant oil-based latexes

 
Synthesis of emulsion polymers from plant oil-based monomers might provide an opportunity to replace petroleum-based constituents in latex synthesis and reduce VOC content in resulting polymeric materials. Incorporation of plant oil-based fragments into the latex copolymers provides plasticization and hydrophobization, as well as improves toughness of the final crosslinked latex polymer films. This work reports on emulsion polymers with biobased content of at least 70 % wt. synthesized in miniemulsion from new vinyl monomers derived from a variety of plant oils using transesterification reaction.