Design evolution towards sustainability: From dual furan and eugenol biomass to functional epoxy resin and its upgrading

Biobased epoxy resins have made great strides in recent years to replace their petroleum-based counterparts, particularly for the diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (DGEBA) resins. Due to their increased sustainability and performance enhancement, bio-epoxy resins meet a multitude of requirements. Herein, a facile route was developed in high yield for the dual biomass monomer DEF from 5-hydroxymethylfurfural and eugenol, which exhibited much lower viscosity than the DGEBA counterpart (0.506 < 10.7 Pa s), thus beneficial for the solvent-free composites and prepreg procedures. The thermosets behaved with excellent mechanical properties and thermal performances. Compared with the DGEBA counterpart, remarkedly, the solvolysis proceeded in N, N-dimethylformamide at ambient conditions and permitted the full breakdown of the biobased matrices. Such merit significantly led to the ready recycling of fillers from their composites rather than being landfilled or incinerated till their end-of-life cycle. Moreover, thermal deformation and shape memory performances are not only fit for the pristine epoxy resins but suitable for the carbon fiber reinforced composites (CFRC) at about 120 ℃, thus allowing their performance upgrade. Therefore, these advantages of renewable thermosets possibly provide a facile and scalable route to access high-value integrated biobased epoxy networks in the industry.