Nov 2020
Result from partner BLOOM.
Result has been achieved on 31 October 2020 in month 6 of the project (results documented in Work Package 2 of the planned result: Extraction of lignin from biomaterials).
While technical lignins are cheap and available in large quantities, their characteristics are not suitable for the development of high-performance marine fuels. Among others, these lignins suffer from low solubilities, large molecular weight, high sulfur content and are generally non-uniform in their chemical nature. One strategy consists in solvent fractionation of technical lignins to extract a high-quality fraction, which can be more suitable for fuels applications. A second strategy consists in the production of high-quality lignin from biomass with alternative bio-refining process. Within IDEALFUEL, the partners selected solvolysis and Aldehyde-Assisted Fractionation (AAF) as the most relevant technologies for the production of high-performance lignin for fuels applications.
- Objective: to verify the ability of the setup to perform extraction of lignin oil at the 1 kg-scale and to supply lignin oil to other project partners
- Research: BLOOM has performed Aldehyde-Assisted Fractionation (AAF) on beechwood at the 15 litres scale to produce stabilised lignin in the 100g-scale.
- Result: Lignin oligomers have been isolated by precipitation. Furthermore, successful preliminary tests on 100L and 250L reactors for AAF of biomass have been run.
- What will it be used for: The results pave the way for the production scale-up.
- Impact: The results confirm that the setup can produce lignin oligomers and monomers with expected yields. These will be further characterised within the next steps of the project.
