Sintesi e caratterizzazione di Biopoliesteri saturi e insaturi ottenuti con monomeri di interesse industriale derivanti da risorse rinnovabili

During my PhD, I focused my attention on synthesis of compounds coming from renewable resources. In detail, I studied a very interesting molecule: itaconic acid. This acid could be an important building block for applications in industrial field thanks to its particular structure. Infact, it is an asymmetric dicarbossilic acid having a double bond: one moiety is similar to a metacrilic acid while the other moiety is similar to a succinic acid. Unfortunately, during the polycondensation, this molecule showed a very low stability in correspondence to high temperature. Furthermore, a side reaction, called Ordelt reaction, took place causing a dramatic consumption of double bond during the synthesis. An important aim of my work was to preserve the unsaturation inside the polymer chains, because it will be useful for further reactions. To avoid the presence of high branching degree, another molecule was used instead of itaconic acid: citraconic anhydride. This latter molecule, deriving from the transposition of the former molecule, showed a major stability during the polycondensation. In this way, the copolymer obtained from the reaction between citraconic anhydride, 1,2 PG and bio-succinic acid had a very low branching degree via spectroscopic analysis (1H-NMR). Moreover, a combo-technique was used to confirm this result: SEC-TD and SEC-semipreparative had worked together to obtain a lot of information about the composition of this copolymer. The corresponding Mark-Houwink plot ((log IV vs log Mw) demonstrated that this copolymer was linear for the whole range of molecular weights. Besides to unsatured compounds, satured compounds were studied: biliar acids. A copolymerization between DCA, bio-succinic acid and 1,2 PG was conducted to obtained a new polymer class having interesting applications in biomedical field.