One of the major contributors to the scarcity of clean, potable water is industrial discharge. Despite extensive progress in the treatment processes of industrial wastewater, the wastewater treatment processes are heavily reliant on oil-based or ineffective inorganic chemicals. As these chemicals can contribute to secondary pollution, e.g., high sludge and landfilling issues, the incentives for using sustainable and effective biochemical are high. On this basis, we previously reported the production and use of aminated lignin-derived polymers with excellent properties [1,2]. Despite their effective performance as flocculants in municipal and industrial wastewater, literature on the production process of these sustainable flocculants is limited to their chemical synthesis. In this presentation, we will discuss how aminated lignin produced in solution systems can be dried and thus produced in a scalable fashion. As one of the bottlenecks of aminated lignin production is the drying operation of lignin polymer solutions, the primary focus of this work will be on identifying the parameters that affect the drying of aminated lignin, and the goal of this work will be to introduce drying methods that can be adopted for lignin polymer production with minimum harms on lignin polymer properties and the environment. For this study, aminated lignin was produced with different characteristics, and they were dried under different conditions, e.g., temperatures and time. Then, the physicochemical properties of the aminated lignin were determined using advanced tools, such as HSQC and P NMR, XPS, DLS, and GPC. This work paves the way for the manufacturing of cationic lignin polymers with various features at a large scale.

Impact of drying methods on the structural and physicochemical characteristics of aminated lignin

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ACS Fall 2022

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