Extraction of Polymeric Hemicelluloses from Spruce Wood
Hemicelluloses are one of the three main components of spruce wood and constitute about 20% of the wood material. During mechanical pulping, 5–10% of the hemicelluloses are accumulated in waste waters, whereas during chemical pulping 70–80% of the hemicelluloses are lost in process liquors. The conc...
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| Format: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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KTH, Träkemi och massateknologi
2015
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| Online Access: | http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-158966 |
| Summary: | Hemicelluloses are one of the three main components of spruce wood and constitute about 20% of the wood material. During mechanical pulping, 5–10% of the hemicelluloses are accumulated in waste waters, whereas during chemical pulping 70–80% of the hemicelluloses are lost in process liquors. The concept of integrated forest biorefinery involves the development of methods to extract these hemicelluloses prior to pulping in order to produce value-added products besides pulp. This thesis describes some of the feasible possibilities of extracting hemicelluloses from wood at a high molecular weight prior to pulping in addition to presenting a deeper understanding of their degradation under mild treatment conditions. A major obstacle for the efficient extraction of hemicelluloses is the recalcitrance due to the network of lignin and polysaccharides. This network can be loosely opened by the use of enzymes and this improves the extraction of hemicelluloses. A chemical impregnation of the wood chips was performed to enhance the accessibility of the cell wall to enzymes. The ability of different additives to stabilize the hemicelluloses against peeling during the alkaline impregnation stage was also investigated in order to obtain a better yield in subsequent extraction. Increasing the surface area and decreasing the mass transport length could also improve the yield of hemicelluloses extracted from wood. This was achieved with a mild mechanical pre-treatment of wood chips using an impressafiner and a fiberizer. Polymers mainly consisting of galactoglucomannan with an average molecular weight of 30 kDa were extracted from fiberized wood with water. Different pre-treatment and extraction methods were combined to demonstrate the concept of material biorefinery based on wood. The kinetics of degradation of spruce galactoglucomannan were studied under alkaline conditions. It was degraded in two phases at two different rates. A kinetic model was developed to fit the experimental data and to estimate the activation energies. === <p>QC 20150119</p> |
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