## 1 Introduction  
The partial replacement of petroleum-derived plastics and composites by bio-based materials from inexpensive, renewable, and natural resources has the potential to greatly impact the plastics and composites industries. Natural starting materials, such as vegetable oils, are readily available in large quantities, low cost, and have the potential to offer properties not currently available in commercial petroleum-based products. These promising characteristics, and the increasing attention bio-renewable chemicals have been receiving in both industrial, and academic settings is expected to lead to significant progress towards environmental sustainability in the near future [1,2]. In recent years, a variety of vegetable oil-based polymers with tunable thermal and mechanical properties have been developed by the free radical, or cationic co-polymerization of regular and modified vegetable oils in the presence of divinylbenzene (DVB), styrene (ST), and/or maleic anhydride [3,4]. In such systems, the reactive sites in the triglyceride units are the carbon-carbon double bonds along the fatty acid chains. Overall, the reactivity of vegetable oils towards these polymerization processes is significantly higher when the carbon-carbon double bonds are conjugated [5]. Furthermore, the higher the degree of unsaturation of an oil, the higher the crosslink density of its resulting co-polymer, and the better its mechanical properties [3]. Over the years, due to an increasing demand for bio-based monomers and drying oils, a number of processes for the conjugation of carbon-carbon double bonds in regular vegetable oils have been developed with the goal of enhancing their reactivity towards polymerization and auto-oxidation [6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. With a high percentage of fatty acids (\(\sim\)84%) [11] bearing a natural system of triply conjugated carbon-carbon double bonds (Figure 1), tung oil constitutes an ideal candidate for the preparation of bio-based materials. Indeed, the carbon-carbon double bonds in tung oil can readily react with vinyl co-monomers, such as DVB, ST, and dicyclopentadiene, via cationic, thermal, or free radical polymerizations, without the need for structural modifications. It has been shown that these reactions result in highly crosslinked polymer networks [12, 13, 14, 15]. Likewise, tung oil has been used as a key component in cationic bio-based thermosets by crosslinking it with limonene and myrcene [16]. Tung oil has also been used in more straight-forward applications, such as protecting coatings for wood surfaces [17], and protein films [18], or as a strengthening additive for unsaturated polyester resins [19]. More complex systems have been obtained by the Diels-Alder reaction of carbon-carbon double bonds in tung oil with dienophiles [20]. These Diels-Alder adducts have been used as diluents in soybean oil-based alkyd resins [20]. Similarly, tung oil fatty acid derivatives have been simultaneously crosslinked with the ring-opening of anhydrides, and the Diels-Alder reaction with dienophiles [21]. Figure 1: Chemical structure of tung oil. Most of these, and other related systems, are obtained through conventional heating, ultra-violet irradiation (UV), or \(\gamma\) irradiation techniques. Recently, the alternative Infra-red curing of tung oil films has been investigated [22]. In unrelated applications, tung oil has been employed as a promising starting material for the preparation of biodiesel [23]. When tung oil is used to produce biodiesel, a high percentage of monoglycerides are formed in comparison to either a soybean oil/tung oil mixture or pure sunflower oil [23]. The properties of composites prepared from the reinforcement of regular petroleum-based thermoplastics, such as polystyrene [24], polyethylene terephthalate [25], polymethyl methacrylate [26], and polypropylene [27], with single and multiwalled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been extensively investigated to date.