Biography
Biography: Julia Schuler
Abstract
Hence, the focus of the presented work is to get a better knowledge of lignin as a starting material to produce chemicals. Therefore, the different influences of temperature and reaction times, the reaction pathways and the therefore necessary analytics need to be understood. But lignin brings a lot of challenges with it. The first is, that every lignin has a different composition, depending on the wood source and the degradation method applied to gain the lignin which has a significant influence on the lignin structure. And with this, a lot of changes come e.g. in the handling of the biomass.
To liquefy lignin towards high functional molecules, hydrothermal conditions are used.
To understand the challenges (reaction pathways, analytic, and so on) of lignin better it is important to have a look at different lignins and lignin sources, so to see if the behavior of lignin under several conditions are the same, and to see if with every lignin the same challenges are coming. Therefore, different lignins were used, e.g. bark or a kraft lignin.
It is also considered that already degraded lignin products molecules repolymerise to oligomers, and so the yield of monomeric phenolic compounds decreases. To have an influence on this, different experiments are run. Fresh medium and feed get in contact with solutions directly after the hydrothermal liquefaction. The repolymersation shall be influenced and stopped through this and the yields of e.g. catechol shall get higher. Also this shall lead to a process for different biomasses, to gain platform chemicals.
Recent Publications:
- D. Forchheim, U. Hornung, A. Kruse, and T. Sutter, “Kinetic Modelling of Hydrothermal Lignin Depolymerisation,” Waste and Biomass Valorization, no. February, pp. 1–10, 2014.
- A. Kruse and N. Dahmen, “Water - A magic solvent for biomass conversion,” J. Supercrit. Fluids, vol. 96, pp. 36–45, 2015.
- P. Schulze, A. Seidel-Morgenstern, H. Lorenz, M. Leschinsky, and G. Unkelbach, “Advanced process for precipitation of lignin from ethanol organosolv spent liquors,” Bioresour. Technol., vol. 199, pp. 128–134, 2016
- T. Faravelli, A. Frassoldati, G. Migliavacca, and E. Ranzi, “Detailed kinetic modeling of the thermal degradation of lignins,” Biomass and Bioenergy, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 290–301, 2010
- D. Forchheim, A. Kruse, “Optimization of the reaction parameters of a CSTR and a PFR ( Batch ) for the recovery of phenol from hydrothermal biomass liquefaction.”