Thermochemolysis with tetramethylammonium hydroxide

Vane, C. H. (2003). The molecular composition of lignin in spruce decayed by white-rot fungu (Phanerochaete chrysosporium and Trametesw versicolour) using pyrolysis GC-MS and thermochemolysis with tetramethylammonium hydroxide. Int. Biodeter. Biodegr. 51, 67-75. 

Clifford, D.J., Carson, D.M., McKinney, D.E., Bortiatynski, J.M., and Hatcher, P.G. (1995) A new rapid technique for the characterization of lignin in vascular plants thermochemolysis with tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH). Org. Geochem. 23, 169-175. 

Structural Characterization of Humic Substances Using Thermochemolysis with Tetramethylammonium Hydroxide... 

Tanezos, I., Rendl, K., and Schmidt, H., The behavior of aldehydes-produced as primary pryrolysis products-in the thermochemolysis with tetramethylammonium hydroxide, J. Anal. Appl. Pyrolysis, 49, 319-327, 1999. 

Derivatization of the sample renders many of these polar pyrolysis products sufficiently volatile for gas chromatographic separation. Thus it is possible to separate and detect many more strucmrally significant products than observed by conventional pyrolysis techniques.The most common of the derivatization processes is a methylation reaction where organic matter is mixed with tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) prior to pyrolysis. Throughout the literature, several different terms have been employed to describe derivatization reaction and in this chapter the term thermochemolysis will be used. 

Tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) is the most commonly used reagent for THM, and TMAH thermochemolysis has been extensively applied to the characterization of organic natural materials [98,103,104,107,108,124,127,134-138]. Py with TMAH involves the deprotonation of carboxylic acids and the hydrolysis of ester and ether bonds, followed by the formation of tetramethylammonium salts, which are subsequently subjected to thermal dissociation and leads to the formation of the corresponding methyl derivatives. 

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