Investigation of the physicochemical properties for vegetable oils and their epoxidized and carbonated derivatives

Vegetable oils are more and more used in industry for the production of biodiesel, biolubricant, or polymer. In this context, production of polyurethane by nonisocyanate routes involves the production of epoxidized and carbonated vegetable oils. The determination of the optimum operating conditions and the scale-up of these processes require the knowledge of different physicochemical properties such as viscosity, density, refractive index, or specific heat capacity. These data are rare for the epoxidized and carbonated vegetable oils, and the evolution of these data with the temperature is absent in the literature. This article proposes to study the evolution of these properties with temperature and composition in double bond, epoxide, and carbonated groups. It was demonstrated that density and refractive index of these oils vary linearly with temperature. Viscosity of these oils, which were found to be Newtonian fluids, is an exponential function of temperature. The ratio of specific heat capacity at a temperature to the specific heat capacity at a reference temperature follows a polynomial equation of second order with temperature. It was demonstrated that some correlations could be used to predict the evolutions of these physicochemical properties at different compositions and temperatures based on the property knowledge of the pure compounds.