Water-soluble lignins in materials application
Dr. Stefania Bertella
VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, Espoo
Abstract:
Lignin is considered one of the most promising sustainable materials of our times, given its abundancy and versatile chemical structure, but its use in commercial materials still remains quite limited. This is due to many different reasons, but some stand out more than others. Lignin is generally a polymer which is not soluble in water, due to a natural imbalanced ratio of hydrophilic/hydrophobic functionalities, unless severe conditions of temperature and pH are applied. These severe conditions, necessary for effective biomass fractionation, promote condensation and repolymerization reactions that hinder even more the solubility of lignin in neutral aqueous environments.
To develop new lignin-based materials it is then often necessary to chemically modify lignin with additional synthetic steps, often involving harmful reagents and/or organic solvents. However, due to environmental and economic restrains, these processes are seldom scaled up outside of a laboratory.
In my talk I will show how we can make lignin a water-soluble polymer over a wide range of pH either involving direct oxidation of commercially available lignins or by designing new processes for its simultaneous extraction and chemical modification. I will also give an overview of VTT Technical research center of Finland, including our activities, research and piloting capabilities, as well as how we build projects and bridge research between academic and industrial partners.
Bio:
Dr. Stefania Bertella obtained her MSc. Degree in organic chemistry at the University of Parma (Italy). She then worked as laboratory engineer in lignin and organic chemistry at Stora Enso (Sweden) before obtaining her PhD in 2022 at EPFL (Switzerland) in the group of prof. Jeremy Luterbacher, working on extraction and controlled functionalization of lignin for materials applications. After a brief postdoc in the group of Prof. Monika Österberg at Aalto University (Finland) she moved permanently at VTT Technical Research Center of Finland where she currently works as Senior Scientist in the lignin and sidestream valorization team. Her current role involves managing and applying for different publicly funded projects at the interface between industry and academia. Her expertise involves the fractionation and downstream processing of different types of biomasses to obtain lignin fractions which are then used in material applications (surfactants, resins, biomedicals etc..), as well as using and developing novel NMR techniques for lignin characterization.
