SUPERVISOR: Antje POTTHAST

PROJECT ASSIGNED TO: Oliver MUSL

In the advancement of the pulp and paper industries towards green biorefinery, lignin poses to be a tempting resource with good chances for future material use. Chemical characterization of the variety of technical or modified lignins available can be of great use to set their field of application or for matters of process control. Thus, there is a high demand for analytical methods suitable to cope with the difficulty of structural and chemical heterogeneity of lignins. Available analytical methods usually aim at the direct characterization of certain polymer properties, i.e. molecular weight distribution, functional group content, etc., but changes in the chemical structure due to processing steps can also be pursued by the investigation of the generated degradation products. Liquid chromatography offers a broad range of techniques for both approaches. When used in combination, an intense analysis of the chemical structure and composition of lignins can be achieved with comparably low requirements. Moreover, efficient high throughput methods can be established while maintaining an adequate depth of analysis. Therefore, a continued development of liquid chromatography techniques is mandatory to attain the ultimate goal of economically feasible analytics on the chemical structure of lignins.