butadiene tagged posts

‘Our team combined a catalyst we recently discovered with new and exciting chemistry to find the first high-yield, low-cost method of manufacturing butadiene,’ says Dionisios Vlachos, Director of the University of Delaware’s Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation. Credit: University of Delaware/ Jeffrey Chase

Findings by scientists could transform the multi-billion-dollar plastics and rubber industries used for manufacturing tires, toys and myriad other products. These items are produced from butadiene, a molecule traditionally made from petroleum or natural gas. But those humanmade materials could get a lot greener soon, thanks to the ingenuity of a team of scientists from three U.S. research universities...

ORNL’s tough new plastic is made with 50 percent renewable content from biomass. Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy; conceptual art by Mark Robbins (hi-res image)

Your car’s bumper is probably made of a moldable thermoplastic polymer called ABS, shorthand for its acrylonitrile, butadiene and styrene components. Light, strong and tough, it is also the stuff of ventilation pipes, protective headgear, kitchen appliances, Lego bricks and many other consumer products. Useful as it is, one of its drawbacks is that it is made using chemicals derived from petroleum.

Now, Dept of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab researchers have made a better thermoplastic by replacing styrene with lignin, a brittle, rigid polymer that, with cellulose, forms the woody cell walls of plants...