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Abstract This work reports on the use of dibutyl itaconate (DBI) as an environmentally friendly plasticizer for polylactide (PLA) with different proportions of DBI in the 2.5–20 wt% (weight content) range. A co‐rotating twin‐screw extrusion process followed by injection molding is employed for the manufacturing of the samples. The results show that the plasticized PLA formulation with 10 wt% DBI offers the most balanced overall properties, with a noticeable increase in the elongation at break from 4.6% (neat PLA) up to 322%, with a tensile modulus of 1572 MPa, and a tensile strength of 23.8 MPa. In the case of 15 and 20 wt% DBI formulations, PLA reaches the saturation point with no more increase in the elongation at break and a clear decrease in the tensile modulus. DBI also decreases the glass transition temperature ( T g ) from 61.3 °C (neat PLA) down to 23.4 °C for plasticized PLA formulation containing 20 wt% DBI, thus showing the high plasticization efficiency of DBI.
Martínez et al. (Tue,) studied this question.