Lignin is among the most abundant natural heteropolymers on Earth. While lignin represents an abundant feedstock material for the production of renewable fuels and value-added chemicals, it is an underutilized value stream in current biomass conversion technologies because there exist no economic and technically feasible routes for lignin depolymerization and upgrading. My work at NREL has focused on elucidating deconstruction pathways of this recalcitrant polymer using homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts. This entails testing putative catalyst species against a library of model compounds as well as using computational modeling of the substrates and catalysts to determine thermodynamic and kinetic parameters. From these preliminary studies, I hope to develop strategies for the selective conversion of biomass to fuels and chemicals. Synthetic techniques applicable to a model compound library, synthesis and spectroscopic characterization of catalyst species, as well as DFT studies of all of the aforementioned will be presented.

Experimental and computational methods for the deconstruction and valorization of lignin

244th National Meeting (2012)

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