β-Butyrolactone is the intramolecular carboxylic acid ester (lactone) of the optically active 3-hydroxybutanoic acid. It is produced during chemical synthesis as a racemate. β-Butyrolactone is suitable as a monomer for the production of the biodegradable polyhydroxyalkanoate poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB). Polymerisation of racemic (RS)-β-butyrolactone provides (RS)-polyhydroxybutyric acid, which, however, is inferior in essential properties (e.g. strength or degradation behaviour) to the (R)-poly-3-hydroxybutyrate originating from natural sources.
β-Butyrolactone is the intramolecular carboxylic acid ester (lactone) of the optically active 3-hydroxybutanoic acid. It is produced during chemical synthesis as a racemate. β-Butyrolactone is suitable as a monomer for the production of the biodegradable polyhydroxyalkanoate poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB). Polymerisation of racemic (RS)-β-butyrolactone provides (RS)-polyhydroxybutyric acid, which, however, is inferior in essential properties (e.g. strength or degradation behaviour) to the (R)-poly-3-hydroxybutyrate originating from natural sources.
== Production == β-Butyrolactone is obtained in 63% yield by the addition of ethanal to ethenone (ketene) in the presence of the clay mineral montmorillonite.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).