In a manner similar to crude oil, technical lignins need refining if their potential as reactive polyphenols of well-defined molecular weight polymers and oligomers is to be actualized. In this paper, we demonstrate that a continuum of narrow fractions can be isolated by the incremental addition of a nonpolar solvent (hexanes) in a polar (acetone) solution of softwood wood kraft lignin. Three distinct commercial samples of softwood kraft lignin were used to examine the validity of the developed protocol using detailed chromatographic and quantitative functional group analytical methods. It was shown that all samples contain a common relatively monodisperse fraction of a polyphenolic material that can be isolated from the different lignins in yields ranging between 10 and 20% w/w. The versatility of the developed fractional precipitation protocol was further validated by creating artificial physical mixtures of the examined lignins in different proportions and isolating from them precisely calculated fractions of nearly identical molecular weight distributions and composition. Overall, the fractional precipitation approach described here offers the possibility that representative specific narrow fractions, common to a variety of softwood kraft lignins, can be isolated irrespective of the manufacturing details of the pulping process. As such, the otherwise known heterogeneous kraft lignin material, whose composition is relatively unpredictable due to manufacturing variations in making pulp, may now offer consistently homogeneous lignin streams with significant commercial ramifications.

Fractionation represents a promising methodology to refine technical lignin and facilitate lignin valorization. Many lignin fractionation processes have been developed on a laboratory scale, but none have been implemented on...

The objective of this study was to evaluate the possibility of producing dissolving grade pulp from tobacco stalk through combining SO2-ethanol-water (SEW) fractionation, alkaline extraction, and bleaching with oxygen (O), chlorine dioxide (D), alkaline extraction with hydrogen peroxide (Ep), and hydrogen peroxide (P) (OD0(Ep)D1P). The results showed that the optimum SEW cooking condition to remove the original xylan and lignin in tobacco stalk to an acceptable level was 6% SO2 charge (by weight) at 135 °C for 180 min. A bleachable pulp (Kappa number of 21.5) was produced from the SEW-treated tobacco stalk via a subsequent 1% NaOH extraction. After the OD0(Ep)D1P sequence bleaching, the bleached pulp showed a high brightness (88.1% ISO) and a high α-cellulose content (94.9%). The viscosity (15.8 cP) and the residual xylan content (4.4%) of the pulp were within acceptable levels for dissolving pulp production. Thus, tobacco stalk was shown to be a viable raw material for dissolving pulp production following a SEW treatment, alkaline extraction, and a conventional bleaching sequence.

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