Air-drying bio-based polyurethane dispersion from cardanol: Synthesis and characterization of coatings

Exploring bio-renewable materials to replace petroleum-based building blocks for advanced coatings has been a major thrust area for researchers for the development of eco-friendly and sustainable products. For the last few decades, there has been significant interest among coating researchers around the world to design water-based polyurethane dispersions (PUDs) that can be cured at ambient conditions. In the present work we synthesized auto-oxidizable PUDs based on cardanol as sustainable material that also provides self-crosslinking attribute to the PUDs. Such types of PUDs are expected to be suitable for water-based industrial protective primers. The cardanol-based intermediates and final products are characterized by FTIR spectroscopy for conformation of synthesis reaction and their structures. The dried films of the coatings, formulated using a suitable drier catalyst, exhibited improvement in mechanical properties and solvent resistance. The oxidative curing has also been investigated by FTIR and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The corrosion resistance properties of the coatings on steel substrate, as studied by using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) technique also showed better performance for cross-linked films. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.