Novel Solvent Deconstruction of Woody Biomass and Isolation of High Purity Lignin

Abstract Submission to Be Considered As An Oral Presentation at AIChE 2016 Annual Meeting in the Chemical Conversion Processes in Forest/Plant Biomass Biorefineries Session

Novel Solvent Deconstruction of Woody Biomass and Isolation of High Purity Lignin

Karissa Garcia, Ruoshui Ma, Scott Geleynse, Xiao Zhang
Washington State University

            Lignin is the most abundant renewable aromatic polymer on territorial earth present in all high plants. Emerging interests in commercialization of lignocellulosic biofuel process injected new enthusiasm to lignin valorization. Due to the main objective of optimizing cellulosic fiber and/or carbohydrate recovery, most of current lignin isolated from either paper making or biorefineries are often difficult to purify and/or has been indiscriminately modified depending on the process conditions. It appears that one strategy has been overlooked is to devise a new method and/or identify a new solvent to extract lignin from plant biomass with a high purity and minimized structural heterogeneity.

            Herein, we will report a new method of applying Deep Eutectic Solvents (DES) for extracting lignin from woody biomass with high yield and high purity. Four different DES were evaluated for treatment of hardwood and softwood. It was found that these DES treatments can selectively extract a significant amount of lignin from wood with high yields: 78% from hardwood and 58% from softwood. The extracted lignin has high purity (95%) with unique structural properties. The mechanism of DES cleavage of ether bonds between phenylpropane units was investigated. The results from this study demonstrate that DES is a promising solvent for wood delignification and the production of a new source of lignin with promising potential applications.

Presenting author:

Karissa Garcia

School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering

Washington State University

Contact: karissa.garcia@wsu.edu, x.zhang@wsu.edu