The Donlan Corporation is a small company founded in 1990 whose mission is to develop products beneficial to the environment. The Company has developed an economical process for thermal polyaspartate (TPA) in bulk resulting in little or no waste product. The polyaspartate is a biopolymer synthesized from L-aspartic acid, a natural amino acid. Due in part to its carboxylate groups, has properties quite similar to those of polyacrylates, so that can be used as dispersants, anti-fouling or superaborbentes, but also have the added advantage of being biodegradables.1 Biodegradation is the decomposition of TPA into products beneficial to the environment as carbon dioxide and water. This avoids having to remove the TPA for the treatment of wastewater and subsequent discharge.
In the process developed by the Corporation Donlan (Scheme 2), the TPA is primarily produced by heating aspartic acid at temperatures above 180 ° C to give rise to polisuccinamida. This reaction is a polymerization step, with elimination of water as the only byproduct. Through the use of catalysts can be used lower temperatures and shorter reaction times. Production performance the polysuccinimide is ~ 97%.
The second step of the process uses an aqueous solution of sodium hydroxide at 60 ° C to transform into polyaspartate polisuccinamida. Because the ring can be opened in two ways, there are two types of bonds in the polymer, a link and a link-to-b.
Scheme 2. Synthesis of thermal polyaspartate
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