The Potential of an Itaconic Acid Diester as EnvironmentallyFriendly Plasticizer for Injection-Molded Polylactide Parts

Abstract

[EN] This work reports on the use of dibutyl itaconate (DBI) as an environmentallyfriendly plasticizer for polylactide (PLA) with different proportions of DBI inthe 2.5¿20 wt% (weight content) range. A co-rotating twin-screw extrusionprocess followed by injection molding is employed for the manufacturing ofthe samples. The results show that the plasticized PLA formulation with10 wt% DBI offers the most balanced overall properties, with a noticeableincrease in the elongation at break from 4.6% (neat PLA) up to 322%, with atensile modulus of 1572 MPa, and a tensile strength of 23.8 MPa. In the caseof 15 and 20 wt% DBI formulations, PLA reaches the saturation point with nomore increase in the elongation at break and a clear decrease in the tensilemodulus. DBI also decreases the glass transition temperature (Tg)from61.3°C (neat PLA) down to 23.4°C for plasticized PLA formulation containing20 wt% DBI, thus showing the high plasticization efficiency of DBI.