Fatty Alcohol

"Fatty alcohols are aliphatic alcohols consisting of a chain of 8 to 22 carbon atoms. Fatty alcohols usually have even number of carbon atoms and a single alcohol group (-OH) attached to the terminal carbon. Some are unsaturated and some are branched. They are widely used in industrial chemistry."

"Most fatty alcohols in nature are found as waxes which are esters with fatty acids and fatty alcohols.^[1] They are produced by bacteria, plants and animals for purposes of buoyancy, as source of metabolic water and energy, biosonoar lenses (marine mammals) and for thermal insulation in the form of waxes (in plants and insects).^[2] Fatty alcohols were unavailable until the early 1900s. They were originally obtained by reduction of wax esters with sodium by the Bouveault–Blanc reduction process. In the 1930s catalytic hydrogenation was commercialized, which allowed the conversion of fatty acid esters, typically tallow, to the alcohols. In the 1940s and 1950s, petrochemicals became an important source of chemicals, and Karl Ziegler had discovered the polymerization of ethylene. These two developments opened the way to synthetic fatty alcohols."