New design concepts to renewable and multifunctional polymer platforms for 3D printing

Driven by sustainability goals and green chemistry principles, the project ambition is to establish innovative and efficient approaches for polymer design and additive manufacturing technologies that lead to the development of renewable and degradable materials having unique functions and abilities.The target is to prepare, by taking advantage of the inherent high complexity of renewable feedstock, new polyester materials, which performance and properties go beyond those of the currently available polyesters.

The renewable building block selected are functional epoxides and organic anhydrides.

The project seeks the critical design of a vast array of polyester materials through additive synthetic concepts (ring-opening alternated copolymerization).

The aim is to reorganize in a clever way the provided functional groups to deliver new polyesters that serve as “inks” for 3D printing technologies.Polyesters are envisaged as one class of the most promising candidate among the “new-economy bioplastics” market: they can be obtained from renewable resource and degrade in harmless products, reducing the impact on the environment and having high potential in terms of sustainability.

The project contributes, through open innovation, to the development of such market at Swedish and EU level by providing materials that serve as platform for modern and more sustainable technologies (3D printing) while fulfilling the requirement of new plastics generation.