Groupwise electrokinetic separation of organic components in biorefinery processes

PROJECT GOAL
To develop and implement a method based on capillary electrophoresis for simultaneous determination of different groups of organic components in wood pulp and pulping liquors.

BACKGROUND
There is currently a great interest in the area of wood biorefining – ie. sustainable processing of wood biomass into bio-based materials, chemicals and bioenergy. A cornerstone in biorefinery activities is the chemical analyses of different wood components. Faster and more efficent analytical methods will improve both throughput and profitability. A bottleneck in the analysis of wood pulp and pulping liquors is that there is today no method avalible for simultaneous determination of different groups of organic components. The standardized method of acid hydrolysis of pulp facilitates simultaneous determination of carbohydrates and lignin, whereas the alternative method based in enzymatic hydrolysis allow determination of carbohydrates and uronic acids. With none of these methods, it is currently possible to simultaneously determine other types of organic components such as hydroxy acids, fatty acids, resin acids and polyphenols. In this work, groupwise separation of such components using electokinetic methods such as capillary electrophoresis will be studied.

ACTIVITIES
• Litterature survey of methods for electrocinetic separation of organic components in wodd pulp and pulping liquids (eg. carbohydrates, lignin and low molecular mass acids).
• Development of method simultaneous quantification of carbohydrates, lignin and low molecular mass acids.
• Report writing (preferably in English).
• Project presentations at Innventia.
• Method implementation (including writing of analytical protocol).
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biorefining, bioraffinering, kapillärelektrofores, elektrofores, elektrokinetisk, kolhydrater,cellulosa, hemicellulosa, svartlut, filtrat, extraktivämnen, syror, analytisk, kemi, trä, träkemi