Increasing efforts in utilizing renewable resources for production of bulk and specialty chemicals or new materials in biorefineries have evoked manifold challenges with regard to separation of the product streams and identification of individual components. While cellulose, lignin and hemicelluloses are the principal main components in all approaches, different starting materials (ranging from wood over annual plants to agricultural waste), natural variability and different processing add to a huge changeability and complexity of biorefinery process streams. Current problems comprise the realm of both carbohydrates and lignin. As to carbohydrates, both low-molecular weight components and polymers are well accessible to analysis, separability provided: the former by suitable gas or liquid chromatographic methods, the latter by size exclusion techniques. A problem is posed by the analysis of the oligomeric fraction “in between”, which is to “large” for GC or LC methods and too small for classical SEC approaches. Similarly, lignin analysis has so far mainly focused on native lignins, whereas technical lignins are only insufficiently covered by the means available. In the present paper, novel analytical approaches for the analysis of cello- and xylo-oligosaccharides (up to twenty subunits) as well as technical lignins are described. Focus is given to robust and fast, yet accurate and comprehensive methods that allow for coverage of large sample numbers.       <br/> <br/>

Recent advances in biorefinery process stream analysis<br />
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249th National Meeting (2015)

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Recent advances in biorefinery process stream analysis<br /> <br />