Abstract
We report here the synthesis of poly(4-ketovalerolactone) (PKVL) via ring-opening transesterification polymerization (ROTEP) of the monomer 4-ketovalerolactone (KVL, two steps from levulinic acid). The polymerization of KVL proceeds to high equilibrium monomer conversion (up to 96% in the melt) to give the semicrystalline polyketoester PKVL. PKVL displays glass transition temperatures of 7 °C and two melting temperatures at 132 and 148 °C. This polyester can be chemically recycled through hydrolytic degradation. Under aqueous neutral or acidic conditions, the dominating pathway for polyester hydrolysis is through backbiting from the chain end. Under basic conditions, midchain cleavage, accelerated by the ketone carbonyl group in the backbone, promotes the hydrolysis of nearby backbone ester bonds. The final hydrolysis product is 5-hydroxylevulinic acid, the ring-opened hydrolysis product of KVL. PKVL was also observed to degrade under the action of a Brønsted acid to a bis-spirocyclic dilactone natural product altaicadispirolactone, which is a dimer of KVL. This constitutes a rare example of a one-step synthesis of a secondary metabolite of nontrivial structure in which a polymer was the starting material and the sole source of matter. Analogous ROTEP of the isomeric four-membered lactone 4-acetyl-β-propiolactone (APL) was also explored, although this chemistry was not as well-behaved as the KVL to PKVL polymerization.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 4952-4959 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Macromolecules |
Volume | 53 |
Issue number | 12 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 23 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by (i) an NSF-funded Center for Chemical Innovation, the NSF Center for Sustainable Polymers (CHE-1901635), and (ii) the Minnesota Corn Growers Association. Some NMR data were collected on instruments that were purchased through the NIH Shared Instrumentation Grant Program (S10OD011952).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 American Chemical Society.
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Journal Article
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Supporting data for Primary data for Poly(4-ketovalerolactone) from Levulinic acid, Synthesis and Hydrolytic Degradation
Xu, S., Wang, Y. & Hoye, T. R., Data Repository for the University of Minnesota, Jun 10 2020
DOI: 10.13020/jw1d-a958, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/213931
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