Vegetable Oil-Based Biodegradable Alkyd Materials for Eco-friendly Coating Applications

Today, the scientific community's fundamental goal is to achieve long-term, sustainable, and environmentally friendly development. Renewable resources' harvesting rather than fossil fuels, designing degradable materials, and taking acceptable eco-friendly paths are all part of this strategy. Vegetable oils are mother nature's most prolific, biggest, biodegradable, non- biocidal, green, easily accessible, and cost-effective resources that can compete with the fossil fuels' petroleum-based materials. Vegetable oils are distinguished by their distinctive chemical structure, including hydroxyls, unsaturated bonds, epoxies, esters, extra- functional units, and intrinsic fluidity. Since ancient times, they have been employed for various non-food uses, primarily coatings. This chapter has briefly described important vegetable oil- based polymeric alkyds for protective surface coatings. It emphasizes various cutting-edge vegetable oil modifications that are environmentally benign, such as low or no solvent, high solids, and hyperbranched coatings. Organic-inorganic alkyd nanocomposites represent a unique class of coating materials in research applications. Inorganic nanofillers have been used in the alkyd nanocomposites because of their better interaction at the filler-polymer interface. Alkyd nanocomposite building blocks fabricated in a constrained environment would have superior mechanical, hydrophobicity, anti-corrosion, and surface robustness. In the future, vegetable oil- based alkyd coatings may be used as green alternatives to develop eco-friendly derived coating materials. This chapter reviews recent advances and ongoing researches on alkyd materials for protective coating applications. It summarized recent progress in vegetable oil-based alkyd coatings and introduced a discussion of current and potential applications as a durable surface coating. It concludes with a discussion of current and upcoming advances followed by future perspectives in the discipline.