SBIR Phase II: Biobased and Biodegradable Polyester Surfactants

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to mitigate the environmental impact of personal care products by developing cost-effective and sustainable alternatives to polymeric surfactants widely used in formulations. A typical surfactant contains over 55% carbon content, whereas the developmental surfactants proposed in this Phase II project can have at least 20% lower carbon content than their commercial counterparts, thus significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Given that an average U.S. citizen uses between 2 and 6 personal care products daily, the majority of which contain 3% to 40% surfactants, this Phase II project's potential environmental and, hence, societal benefits are significant. This work will enhance the design understanding of these polymeric surfactants that will be built using farm residue ingredients and programmed to biodegrade after their useful life, creating a closed-loop carbon cycle.

The market impact of these polymeric surfactants is not limited to personal care products but extends into household detergents, institutional and industrial cleaners, agriculture, oilfield chemicals, food processing, textiles, etc. This project can revolutionize multiple industries, making it a promising commercialization opportunity.

The proposed project intends to develop and scale up the next-generation polymeric surfactants, which are safe for human use, enhance consumer experience, and are built with environmental sustainability in mind. The development and utilization of a novel chemoselective synthesis will enables a polycondensation reaction for building polyester and polyesteramide surfactants from biobased residues.

The research objectives are to 1) demonstrate that the optimized surfactants can be scaled up using green chemistry principles, 2) demonstrate, verify, and validate their surface activity, 3) establish their safety profile, and 4) validate their biodegradability. This research will utilize design-of-experiment studies to generate surface response curves to identify the optimized surface activity attributes by varying the molecular composition of the polymeric surfactants.

Furthermore, the safety studies for the optimized surfactants will confirm their suitability for human skin applications, while biodegradability tests will ascertain their ready biodegradability in effluent treatment plant environments. Successful execution of the experimental design will result in the development of sustainable polymeric surfactants.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.