Functional Xylose Polymer Platform for Sustainable Plastics

该项目旨在开发能够利用生物质的生物和生化工程处理所产生的糖分子的技术，并将其转化为具有与应用相关的性能的新聚合物的平台。该方法还将包括这些新材料的寿命结束，无论是通过研究它们在不同条件下的降解，还是通过将它们反馈到生物和生化过程中。我们将在大型碳水化合物池中重点关注D-木糖，因为它丰富，来自废物和非可食用果皮，其价格(0.5美元/公斤)接近石化原料。此外，木糖很容易修饰，特别是通过缩酮官能化，并且能够与其呋喃或吡喃糖形式一起工作提供了多种单体的可能性。通过创建一个基于功能木糖的聚合物平台，我们还将努力确定明确的结构/性质关系，我们的工作计划将包括：1)以木糖为原料合成官能化单体，包括极性环状单体、环状和非环状烯烃；2)对选定的生物质(例如木聚糖)进行生物和生化处理所得到的富含木糖的蒸气的利用；3)利用开环聚合(包括复分解)、无环二烯歧化聚合和可逆失活自由基聚合方法对这些单体进行受控聚合；4)合成聚合物的完整的热、机械和物理表征；5)为这一新的聚合物平台制定一般的结构-性能关系；6)利用这些材料设计规则来开发更好的聚合物；7)将选定的聚合物作为商品塑料进行加工和进一步评估8)将这些聚合物用作选定的生物和生化过程的原料，以探索热降解或水解性降解的替代寿命选择。

The project aims to develop the technologies which will enable the utilisation of sugar molecules derived from thebiological and biochemical engineering treatment of biomass, and transform them into a platform of new polymerswith properties relevant to applications. The approach will also incorporate the end-of-life of these new materials,either by studying their degradation under various conditions, or by feeding them back to biological and biochemicalprocesses.We will focus, amongst the large carbohydrate pool, on D-xylose, as it is abundant, comes from waste and non-ediblecrops, and its price ($0.5/kg) is close to petrochemical feedstocks.Furthermore, xylose is easily modified, in particular via ketal functionalisation, and the ability to work with its furanoseor pyranose form offers multiple monomer possibilities.By creating a platform of functional xylose-based polymers, we will also strive to identify a clear structure/propertyrelationship, which will be exploited to deliver polymers with the desired properties, including for application ascommodity plastic materials.Our work programme will include:1) the optimal (few steps, renewable reagents) and scalable (target scale 100g) synthesis of functionalisedmonomers from xylose, including polar cyclic monomers, cyclic and acyclic olefins;2) the utilization of xylose-rich stream obtained from biological and biochemical treatments of selected biomass (e.g.xylans)3) the controlled polymerisation of these monomers using ring-opening polymerisation (including metathesis), acyclicdiene metathesis polymerisation, and reversible deactivation radical polymerisation methods;4) the complete thermal, mechanical and physical characterisation of the synthesised polymers;5) the formulation of a general structure-property relationship for this new polymer platform;6) the exploitation of these material design rules to develop better polymers;7) the processing and further evaluation of selected polymers as c ommodity plastics8) the utilization of the polymers as feedstock for selected biological and biochemical processes, to explorealternative end-of-life options to thermal or hydrolytic degradation.