In recent years with the 21<sup>st</sup> century´s digital revolution the global demand for paper has started to decrease in the developed countries. On the other hand the population of the World is continuously increasing and has to be provided by textiles for clothing and plastic consumables. Dissolving pulp is a high purity cellulose pulp which is the raw material for many value added products such as textiles and cellulose esters and ethers, which are used to produce fibers, films, filters etc.  For establishing future paper pulp based biorefineries, the decreasing need for paper pulp can be combined with the increasing demand for dissolving pulp. IONCELL-P is a modern fractionation method using ionic liquids (IL) and water to upgrade the hemicellulose rich paper pulp to high purity dissolving pulp and coproduce polymeric hemicellulose without yield losses. Understanding the effect of chosen fractionation parameters and the mechanism of the fractionation is crucial to design more complex business cases where the ILs can be utilized in multiple process steps (for example: IONCELL-P fractionation then spinning with IONCELL-F, an IL based fiber spinning technology). Eventually in a well-designed process the IL can be recycled from many different applications in a combined recycling system. The effect of different raw material, used IL and applied water content is already known. To understand the mechanism of the fractionation, pure polysaccharides were fractionated with the IONCELL-P. The molecular weight distribution of the polysaccharide fractions could be tuned by the amount of water used in the fractionation. This also gives a new perspective on how to further improve IL-water based fractionations.

From paper pulp tp dissolving pulp to textile fibres with ionic liquids using IONCELL-P&F

249th National Meeting (2015)

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