화학공학소재연구정보센터
Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.51, No.34, 11045-11053, 2012
Extraction, Recovery, and Characterization of Hardwood and Grass Hemicelluloses for Integration into Biorefining Processes
For this work, four hardwoods (silver birch, sugar maple, a hybrid poplar, and a hybrid aspen) and one cultivar of switchgrass were treated with increasing levels of NaOH. The recovered cell wall biopolymers were characterized based on total extraction, precipitation using ethanol or acidification, xylan content, and molar mass of the recovered precipitates. The extractability of cell wall polymers was clearly shown to be a function of the biomass type with more than 50% of the cell walls of switchgrass solubilized by alkali while only up to 20% of the maple was solubilized under comparable conditions. Precipitation with ethanol resulted in high recovery yields of hemicelluloses from the original biomass for silver birch and switchgrass, and most notably, the birch precipitates contained double the hemicellulose content of the precipitates from other feedstock alkali extracts (80% versus 30-50%). The molar masses of the recovered hemicellulosic polysaccharides were characterized using size exclusion chromatography (SEC) and an assay to quantify polysaccharide reducing ends. SEC analysis showed that the biopolymers exhibited a strong tendency to self-associate during elution and that this aggregation could be eliminated through sonication. The reducing end method showed an increase in the number-average degree of polymerization toward an asymptotic maximum with increasing extraction pH, and this value was significantly increased by bleaching the precipitate to remove interference by nonpolysaccharides.