Sustainable Diepoxide Monomers for Polyoxazolidinone‐Based High‐Performance Thermoplastics

Owing to their outstanding mechanical, thermal, and chemical properties, polyoxazolidinones, which are accessible from the reaction of diepoxides and diisocyanates, have recently gained interest as a new class of high‐performance thermoplastic materials. However, mainly bisphenol A diglycidyl ether (BADGE) has thus far served as benchmark for the diepoxide part. Herein, ten bisphenol‐free diepoxides that are either bio‐based or derived from chemical recycling are presented. All these epoxides selectively resulted in linear polyoxazolidinones using methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) and p ‐tert‐butyl phenyl glycidyl ether as chain regulators. The new polymers were characterized, and the thermal and mechanical properties were compared to the BADGE‐based reference polyoxazolidinone. With three of the new diepoxide monomers, polyoxazolidinones with properties matching or surpassing those of BADGE‐based polyoxazolidinone were obtained.