Finding sustainable substitutes for petroleum-based energy, materials, and chemicals is required to allow our society to transitioning from a petroleum based economy to a bio-based economy. Biorefinery systems offer the promise to increase the efficiency of producing sustainable bio-based products, through producing multiple products in an integrated industrial platform. As part of the corn ethanol biorefinery system, dried distillers' grains (DDG) are produced as byproduct and are currently sold as animal feed.  However, production of additional products may be envisioned from the DDG stream, which has an abundance of protein, cellulose, hemicelluloses, starch, and fat. Hemicelluloses, which are underutilized as an animal feed, may be extracted and made into other more valuable products. These materials have in the past been considered for creating paper coatings, which are currently produced from petroleum-based polymers. In this study, polymeric hemicelluloses were extracted from DDG through an alkaline extraction followed by ethanol precipitation. The extracted biopolymers were characterized chemically and then formed into films and paper coatings which were evaluated for thermal and mechanical properties. Comparing the extracted hemicelluloses to commercial vinyl acetate ethylene (VAE) film forming polymers, both were able to provide improved strength properties were found, though the VAE films were superior suggesting additional polymer modification are required.  The hemicelluloses films were stiffer than the VAE with a considerably higher glass transition temperature of about 205 �C.  Additionally, the hemicelluloses films displayed 6.5 times higher normalized water vapor transfer rate (NWVTR) than VAE films suggesting unique properties of the hygroscopic film.  Overall results suggest processing the DDG hemicelluloses into coating materials would economically benefit the corn ethanol industry, developing a more integrated biorefinery system, and would advance replacement of petroleum-based coating materials.

Alkaline extraction of hemicelluloses from dried distillers' grains and the production of paper coatings

247th National Meeting (2014)

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