
375Vegetable Oils for Green Composites
16.4.2 Polyesters
Vegetable oil–based polyesters can also be successfully synthesized from differ-
ent kinds of vegetable oils depending on their availability in a particular region.
The prime routes used for the synthesis of vegetable oil–based polyesters include
polycondensation of dicarboxylic acids (or anhydrides) and diols, condensation of
hydroxyl acids, or ring-opening polymerization of lactones (Guner et al. 2006).
Figure 16.16 shows the general schemes for polyester synthesis.
Soybean oil has been modied via anhydride functionalization of the double bonds
and polymerized with the resulting monomers ...