Development of Near-Critical Water Reaction System for Utilization of Lignin as Chemical Resources

Plant biomass has been proposed to be an alternative source for petroleum-based chemical compounds. Especially, phenolic chemical compounds can be obtained from lignin by chemical depolymerization processes because lignin consists of complex aromatic polymer such as trans-p-coumaryl, coniferyl and sinapyl alcohols, etc. Phenolic chemical compounds from lignin were usually produced in super critical water. However, we applied Near-critical water (NCW) system because NCW is known as a good solvent for lignin depolymerization. Organic matter like lignin can be solved in NCW system and the system has a unique acid-base property without conventional non-eco-friendly chemicals such as sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide. In this work, we tried to optimize the NCW depolymerization system by adjusting the processing variables such as reaction time, temperature and pressure. Moreover, the amount of additional phenol was optimized by changing the molar ratio between water and phenol. Phenol was used as capping agent to prevent re-polymerization of active fragment such as formaldehyde. Alkali-lignin was used as a starting material and characterized by a Solid State 13C-NMR, FT-IR and EA (Elemental Analysis). GC-MS analysis confirmed that o-cresol, p-cresol, anisole and 4-hydroxyphathalic acid were the main product and they were quantitatively analyzed by HPLC.