BIOMASS-BASED MATERIALS

Bio-based Polyols for Industrial Application

Look around you, the world is surrounded by a large number of polyurethane products. Foams, coatings, elastomers, and adhesives are some of the products out of the varying functionalities of a polyol. In general, Polyols are compounds that contain two or more hydroxyl groups in one molecule and depending on their molecular weights, polyols can be divided into two, the monomeric polyols and the polymeric polyols.

Nowadays, most of our commercially available polyols and polyurethanes are made from petrochemical derivatives. Recently, the world is facing one of the major problems such as depletion of fossil resources, global warming emissions increase and the need to reduce the total energy demand. Because of this, interests have been spurred in developing bio-based polyols and Pus from renewable resources such as vegetable oils and lignocellulosic biomass. With respect to vegetable oil and lignocellulosic biomass, our country is blessed with these renewable resources such as rice straw, corn stoves, coconut and palm oil that might be use as an alternative source for the production of polyols and PUs. These biomass-based alternatives since they are renewable, they are more feasible economically and might address the global warming emissions increase.

With this, this DOST-PCIEERD funded project entitled, “Processing of Bio-based Polyols and Polyurethane for Industrial Applications” aimed to utilize these renewable resources as an alternative way in producing polyols and PUs for the production of materials that are very significant to industry. One of the focuses of this project is to produce rigid foams out from rice straws collected from municipalities or barrios near MSU-IIT, the implementing agency of the said project. These collected rice straws undergo a process/reaction to produce a polyol for the production of rigid foams. Not only that, the project is not only producing polyols and PUs as results of the study but they were also able to contact or tie up industries to make these brilliant ideas a reality and can help address the different factors or problems that the world are facing right now!