Carbon dioxide and vegetable oil for the synthesis of bio-based precursors

The present research aims at developing new very efficient organocatalysts for the chemical fixation of carbon dioxide onto epoxides that are precursors of non-isocyanate polyurethanes (NIPUs). Although this area of research is the subject of many works, the catalytic performance must be further enhanced in particular for the carbonatation of vegetable-based precursors while respecting environmental standards. In this context, we developed a new organocatalytic platform based on the combination of ammonium salts with single or double hydrogen bond donor activators that showed unexpected catalytic activity for the fast addition of CO2 onto epoxidized oils under mild conditions. First of all, in situ kinetic studies of the cycloaddition of CO2 onto model epoxidized oils were performed by FT-IR spectroscopy in order to evaluate the influence of the hydrogen bond structure and various parameters such as the pressure, the temperature, the catalyst loading, and the nature of the epoxide on the reaction kinetics. Thanks to this catalyst screening, we found that ammonium salt/fluorinated hydrogen bond donors bicomponent organocatalysts were by far more efficient than that proposed in the literature under mild conditions (60°C, 2MPa). Then, the reaction mechanism of the organocatalyzed cycloaddition of propylene oxide onto CO2 was elucidated by performing Density Functional Theory (DFT). Our theoretical results highlighted the key role of the hydrogen bond interaction between the epoxide and the activators for the enhancement of the catalytic platform’s efficiency.