Trends in Chemistry opportunities for the production of controlled lignin structures and the incorporation of these structures into materials, which we describe later.
Lignin is a promising candidate for the replacement of fossil-based materials, due to its natural abundance and aromatic structure. This same structure poses major challenges to lignin’s exploitation for material...
Lignin depolymerization could provide an attractive renewable aromatic feedstock for the chemical industry. Past studies have suggested that lignin structural features such as ether content are correlated to lignin's upgradeability. An obstacle to the development of a conclusive causal relationship between lignin structure and upgradeability has been the difficulty to quantitatively measure lignin structural features. Here, we demonstrated that a modified HSQC-NMR method known as HSQC 0 can accurately quantify lignin functionalities in extracted lignin using several synthetic polymer models. We then prepared a range of isolated lignin samples with a wide range of ether contents (6-46%). By using a simple ether cleavage model, we were able to predict final depolymerization yields very accurately (<4% error), conclusively demonstrating the direct causal relationship between ether content and lignin activity. The accuracy of this model suggests that, unlike in native lignin, ether linkages no longer appear to be randomly distributed in isolated lignin. Fig. 2 Experimental sequence including preparation of aldehyde-stabilized lignin samples, prediction of monomer yields by HSQC NMR, and the validation of results with experimental yields. 8136 | Chem. Sci., 2019, 10, 8135-8142 This journal is
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