Chemicals Production From Lignin

In the acid hydrolysis process (79—81), wood is treated with concentrated or dilute acid solution to produce a lignin-rich residue and a Hquor containing sugars, organic acids, furfural, and other chemicals. The process is adaptable to all species and all forms of wood waste. The Hquor can be concentrated to a molasses for animal feed (82), used as a substrate for fermentation to ethanol or yeast (82), or dehydrated to furfural and levulinic acid (83—86). Attempts have been made to obtain marketable products from the lignin residue (87) rather than using it as a fuel, but currently only carbohydrate-derived products appear practical. 

Modem concretes often incorporate a mixture of chemical and mineral admixtures, each of which may interact with the various constituents of cements and influence cement hydration reactions. The admixture-cement interactions may in fact be viewed as the reaction between two complex chemical systems - the multicomponent, multiphasic inorganic materials in the cement and the organic compounds of multicomponent admixture systems. For example, lignosulfonate water-reducers are intrinsically complex mixtures of chemical compounds derived from the chemical degradation of lignin, while synthetic admixtures such as superplasticizers contain species with a broad distribution of molecular weights, reaction products, or other chemicals added for a specific purpose [125]. The performance of an admixture in concrete is highly dependent on many... 

The chemical and technological aspects of lignin modification and utilization are discussed. Competition with petrochemicals does not, for a number of reasons, permit the commercial utilization of non-oil based products made from lignin. However, pressure from governments and the public for a cleaner environment and new pulping processes (organosolv processes) may inevitably result in full scale industrial use of lignin other than fuel within the not too distant future. 

It is becoming apparent that wood components, especially lignin, are chemically modified by solvents during wood dissolution, and that the resulting wood tars or pastes become highly reactive. Attempts have therefore been made to prepare effective adhesives, moldable resins and other products from wood after dissolution in phenols or polyhydric alcohols. This review presents recent progress on wood dissolution, and on the preparation of epoxy and phenol resin adhesives from kraft lignin. 

The discovery of phthalic acid as a major oxidation product of kraft alkali lignin is important not only because it opens up a possible large-scale source of phthalic acid, but because it demonstrates that under the proper conditions, chemicals not ordinarily expected from lignin can be produced from this raw material. Thus, we expect that soon other completely unexpected chemicals will be found in lignin reaction mixture. 

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