Biofene™, a New, Renewable Monomer with NOVEL Properties: Polymer Development, Characterization, and Use in Elastomer Formulations

Amyris is a renewable products company that provides sustainable alternatives to a broad range of petroleum-sourced products.  Amyris uses its white biotechnology platform to convert plant sugars into a variety of molecules -- flexible building blocks that can be used in a wide range of products.  Amyris has developed and optimized yeast strains to produce trans-β-farnesene (farnesene, or BioFene™) and in 2012 commissioned the first purpose-built plant to manufacture commercial quantities of farnesene.  Farnesene is a versatile building block and provides differentiated performance across a range of applications.  Its conjugated diene structure makes it a direct replacement for butadiene and isoprene, as well as acrylates and other olefins, and it has been shown to be a drop-in monomer into a range of polymerization chemistries, including anionic, radical, coordination, and cationic polymerization.  When the diene moiety of farnesene is incorporated into the backbone of a polymer structure, the unique structure of its side-chain enables step-change performance in many materials applications.  Amyris has partnered with Kuraray, a pioneering global chemical products company, to develop farnesene-based polymers.  The first product to be developed under this collaboration is Liquid Farnesene Rubber (LFR), which is used as a plasticizer additive for tires and has been shown to provide lowered rolling resistance and improved rubber compounding.  In an expansion of this collaboration, Kuraray is developing new thermoplastic elastomers based on farnesene, thus growing their line of hydrogenated styrenic block copolymers.  These new farnesene-based materials show differentiated performance, including improved vibrational dampening, improved compression and permanent set, and greater softness.  Based on the performance advantages demonstrated to date with farnesene in elastomer applications, there are many further opportunities to develop a wide range of new, farnesene-based rubber materials with disruptive performance.