Plasticizers are ubiquitous environmental contaminants. Biodegradation of some of these chemicals, such as di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP or DOP), has been shown to lead to the accumulation of toxic metabolic breakdown products. As a result there is a desire to produce new, fully biodegradable, "green" plasticizers. With this goal in mind, a series of tests were developed to be used to measure the plasticizing efficiency of potential green plasticizers. The base resin selected for the study was poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC). The glass transition temperature (Tg) of the plasticized polymer was measured by temperature-modulated differential scanning calorimetry (TMDSC). Tensile tests were carried out on samples of the material from which the tensile strength and the strain at break of the material were measured. The aforementionned properties were measured for PVC plasticized with the commercial plasticizers DEHP, diethylene glycol dibenzoate (DEGDB) and dipropylene glycol dibenzoate (DPGDB) at several plasticizer concentrations. / 1,5 pentanediol dibenzoate (PDDB) was synthesized and evaluated as a plasticizer by comparing results for this compound with those for the commercial plasticizers using the developed tests. The depression in Tg and tensile properties were comparable at a fixed composition for blends with PDDB relative to blends with DEHP, DEGDB, and DPGDB. PDDB was subjected to biodegradation unsing co-metabolism by the common soil bacterium Rhodococcus rhodocrous (ATCC 13808). After 16 days of growth, nearly all the PDDB was degraded and only small amounts of transient, unidentified, metabolites were observed in the growth medium during the experiment.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.116041 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Firlotte, Nicolas. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Engineering (Department of Chemical Engineering.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002842046, proquestno: AAIMR66978, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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