Anticorrosive epoxy coatings from direct epoxidation of bioethanol fractionated lignin

The development of lignin-based anticorrosive epoxy coatings for steel protection is beneficial for both alleviating the fossil resource depletion and value-added utilization of lignin but remains a challenge due to the inherent heterogeneous structure of lignin. Here, we selectively extract the low molecular weight (MW) fraction of a crop residue-derived enzymatic hydrolysis lignin (EHL) through a bioethanol fractionation process and prepare epoxy resin by direct epoxidation of the bioethanol fractionated lignin (BFL). The coatings are then fabricated using 20-100 wt% of BFL-based epoxy resin (LEp) as the commercial epoxy resin substitute. The low MW and high p-hydroxyphenyl content of the BFL offer high solubility and good workability for BFL and LEp during epoxidation and coating production, respectively. Lignin-based coatings with 20-40 wt% LEp exhibit good adhesion property (5B) and superior corrosion resistance, compared to the commercial epoxy coating. Although coating with high LEp concentrations (i.e., 60-100 wt%) resulted in decreased adhesion strength, the coating with 100 wt% LEp still displayed corrosion protection performance comparable to that of the commercial epoxy coating. Overall, this study provides a simple and effective approach to converting lignin to epoxy resins for a wide variety of surface coating applications.