Relating Chemical Structure to Toughness via Morphology Control in Fully Sustainable Sebacic Acid Cured Epoxidized Soybean Oil Toughened Polylactide Blends

The use of soybean oil or its derivatives to toughen polylactide (PLA) usually leads to limited toughening efficiency, due to the incompatibility between toughening agents and parent PLA. Herein, we report a dynamic vulcanization method to toughen PLA using sebacic acid cured epoxidized soybean oil (VESO), a fully sustainable and biodegradable component. A series of sebacic acid cured epoxidized soybean oil precursors (SEPs) were prepared with different carboxyl/epoxy equivalent ratio (R), which consequently dictates the chemical structure and the morphology of PLA/VESO blends after the dynamic vulcanization. We demonstrated that the chemical structure of VESO plays a critical role in the compatibility, morphology, and toughness of the PLA/VESO blends. By optimizing the R-value, supertoughened PLA blends can be obtained, as evidenced by the significant improvement in the tensile toughness (up to 150.6 MJ/m3) and the impact strength (up to 542.3 J/m). The results of the toughening mechanism from the morphology study confirm that the chemical structure of VESO is the key indicator of the toughening efficiency. For the PLA/VESO blends, at optimized R-value, the fracture energy can be dissipated efficiently through shear yielding of the PLA matrix induced by internal VESO cavitation to achieve supertoughness.