This century opens new opportunities for the engineering of chemical reactions involving renewable materials, coupled with product design requirements as specified by the polymer processor. Environmentally conscious design of transformation process is a necessity for the plastics industry. Colombia as the fourth palm oil producer in the world has an increasing crop of palm per hectare. Palm hybrid olein, a product of palm oil refining, was epoxidized by the in-situ production of peracetic acid from hydrogen peroxide and glacial acetic acid using acid catalysis. The effect of several process parameters were studied to improve the epoxide yield thus favoring the plasticizing effect of the functionalized triglyceride; the process simulation was held using some adjusted kinetic parameters from Gan et Al allowing reproducible production of palm olein epoxides.

After stabilization and purification, the epoxide was incorporated on PVC from local industry (in the Andean region supplied by Mexichem-Petco) using di-octyl phthalate (DOP) as primary plasticizer. By varying the amount of DOP/epoxide ratio and through a statically design of the experiment, the insertion of the epoxide during PVC extrusion, allowed the replacement of 30-50% of DOP content as plasticizer. Selected thermomechanical properties were measured including the glass transition temperature, Tg, which for the PVC-Plasticizer mix was adjusted by the use of the Cox-equation, allowing the thermodynamic validation of the mixture. Several solvents were employed to measure the solubility parameter ( 8.06 cal/cm3) matching several models for the Gibbs Excess energy with adjustment for the prediction of compatibility via activity coefficients. Long term stability was measured through the detection of permeation rates from films subjected to external pressure; also oxygen and water permeability was measured. Finally a product film was manufactured in an ISO recognized industrial colombian laboratory and key properties measured and adjusted to match industry specifications. Due to high variation in crop composition the same study was performed with oil produced from different regions of Colombia. The determination of the large scale viability for the incorporation of palm oil epoxides on PVC is ongoin on several industrial extrusion trials to be performed with Colombian PVC processors. The production cycle is robust enough in order to respond not only to price variations in crude oil but also to the struggle between vegetable oils as their prices rise, a direct consequence of the biofuels boom, this was examined using a process model to analyse multifeedstock variation (palm and soybean oil).