Kinetics and Mechanism of the Synthesis of a Novel Protein‐Based Plastic Using Subcritical Water

We investigated the intermolecular mechanism and kinetics of the synthesis of a novel biodegradable protein‐based plastic from bovine serum albumin under subcritical water conditions using batch reactors. The reaction mechanism could be viewed as a chain reaction stabilized by the formation of intermolecular disulfide bonds. The kinetic analysis was based on non‐steady‐state kinetics using a theoretical model developed in one of our previous works. The activation energy and pre‐exponential factor were found to be 7.2 kJ/mol and 0.9 s −1 , respectively. These low values signify that the reaction is relatively temperature‐insensitive with some diffusion limitation.