Sustainability in Wood Utilizing Sectors, a Student Perspective 

     The main goal of the Center for Innovative Biomaterial Education and Research (CIBER) is to address key educational and research issues associated with the field of biomaterials and fuels derived from renewable biomass resources. In July 2009 Georgia Tech students and professors will travel to Portugal to meet and exchange thoughts on their achievements and discuss perspectives in these fields with highly respected representatives from three Portuguese universities and a research institute. Continuous heavy reliance on imported fossil fuels can jeopardize every nation’s energy and economic security, rendering the development of a sustainable replacement for petroleum a key global challenge. Forest biorefineries are one of the most promising technology platforms to convert lignocellulosic material readily available in forest resources into value-added biofuels, biomaterials, biochemicals and biopower. This exchange will help foster international exchange or research, education and professional development opportunities.

July 17-19, 2009 From Atlanta to Lisbon then Covilha: 

Travelers:             Dr. Arthur J. Ragauskas

                        Dr. Cameron Tyson

                        Mr. Gregory Marr

                        Mr. Anthony Baldridge

                        Ms. Tina Dreaden

                        Mr. Matyas Kosa

                        Ms. Kathy Woody

                        Ms. Christina Young

We left Atlanta and flew through Paris to Lisbon on Friday (07/17/2009) and arrived Saturday morning. Followed by a day spent in Lisbon we took a train to Covilha, Sunday in the afternoon and arrived early evening. Our host Ms. Atika Oudia from the University of Beira Interior (UBI) welcomed our group at the train station. Her research in the area of lignocellulosics overlap’s with our work at Georgia Tech, Institute of Paper Science and Technology. At our first destination we will present our work, listen to the achievements of our Portuguese colleagues, give opinions and discuss future work.

It is clear that on both sides of the ocean the sustainable utilization of forest resources for BioPower, BioFuels, BioPower, BioMaterials and BioChemicals is a growing theme.  In Portugal, the interest is in utilizing their productive Eucalyptus resources whereas in the southeastern US attention is focused on pine.  The following seminar titles presented by GA Tech students and faculty give an idea about the areas that were discussed.

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July 20-21, 2009 Seminars in Covilha

            After the kind introduction by our host Dr. Ana Paula Duarte we heard the first presentation from Dr. Art Ragauskas about the future of biorefineries in the US and in the EU including various reasons for their existence and fast development in recent years. As emphasized on the seminar the concerns about sustainability are an older “tradition” in Europe while the US is catching up fast in the last few years thanks to social, environmental and governmental pressures. The growth in CO2 emission and its role in anthropogenic global warming seems obvious and well confirmed hence if humanity wants to act on time it would be thoughtful to stabilize the emission below 550 ppm. An alternative for conventional fuels could be the ethanol fermented from biomass resources, that was first used as octane enhancer in fossil fuels. If the amount of ethanol produced nationally grows it could solve multiple problems like energy security and employment issues especially if it is from cellulosic materials. By 2030 the US would like to substitute 30% of its fossil fuel use by biofuels coming from that one billion tons of biomass that can be used for their production without affecting food/feed resources. Ongoing research and demonstration plant scale experiments showed a promising results and the remaining obstacles are addressed. One of the main drawbacks for developing any technology in this area is the recalcitrance of biomass an issue that proved to be really hard to solve so far. For this reason multiple national laboratories, universities and research institutes divided the route to solution into three stages, namely:

  1. Biomass formation and modification
  2. Characterization and modeling
  3. Biomass deconstruction and conversion.

In the first step researchers analyze the route of lignin biosynthesis and try to modify it towards a way that is more beneficial for pretreatment by enabling more sugar to be released. Dr. Ragauskas’ group is mainly interested in the evaluation of these different modified substrates by characterizing their structure and composition with different analytical techniques like NMR. It is important to mention that the final goal of this nation wide research is to get rid of pretreatment what would lead to not just sustainability but also feasibility.

            Dr. Cameron Tyson gave an introduction about the ongoing activities in Georgia Tech’s Chemistry and Biochemistry Department and later the students held their presentations. There was much interest in the difference in the educational system between US and Portuguese universities and how students from the two countries could leverage these opportunities in the future.

            On behalf of our hosts at UBI, Dr. Ana Paula Duarte held a seminar about the current fields of research at their university, from which a few interesting areas are really noteworthy. The closest to our interests are:

  1. Unit of Textile and Paper Materials:
    1. Studies of fibers, renewable materials and composites
    2. Processing wastes from the pulp and paper industry
    3. New natural products
    4. Biomass to bioethanol in the forestry
    5. Paper production unit modeling
    6. Biorefining of Kraft pulps

She also emphasized on the fact that in the past years concerns about sustainability are stronger then earlier.

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July 22-24, 2009 From Covilha to Aveiro and visiting RAIZ: 

On Wednesday we left Covilha and UBI behind on a long train ride to Aveiro, which is much closer to the Atlantic shore, and RAIZ the Portuguese Institute of Paper Science has its head quarters near this city. The following day Dr. Ragauskas gave two presentations at RAIZ about our research at GT/IPST on biofuels and biomaterials then later Matyas Kosa gave a seminar on his research. Dr. Ragauskas’ presentations were almost completely different and much more technical then previously according to the special expectations by our “brother-institute”. He put special emphasis on our work with hemicellulose extraction prior to pulping and its conversion to ethanol, possible higher value utilizations of lignin and a comprehensive view of pulp and paper facilities as possible future biorefineries. RAIZ scientist Mr. Gabriel Sousa agreed on these points however he mentioned that most of the extraction methods they applied degraded hemicelluloses so they couldn’t convert them, however he noted that this could be a special problem with their unique wood: eucalyptus. On the second presentation Dr. Ragauskas concentrated on our work with nanomaterials and their special advantageous properties in bionanocomposites as well as work with ionic liquids. After lunch we heard two seminars: one from Dr. Jose Luis Amaral the technical director of RAIZ, who summarized their research on every area connected with paper industry. He went from optimizing soil and nutrition conditions on eucalyptus farms through pulping and bleaching techniques -emphasizing that they don’t use oxygen delignification but instead apply 5 stages in bleaching- all the way to paper properties and their markets. Mr. Sousa held the second seminar about all ongoing biorefinery research and main sustainability concerns that are considered important by the institute, showing excellent and well detailed schemes on the possible routes for wood conversion to bioenergy. We finished our visit by having a walk through their centennial forest behind the institute with the 100-year-old eucalyptus trees giving perfect background for our discussions.

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            Friday (7/24/2009) we had the great opportunity to visit a model eucalyptus plantation where RAIZ researchers introduced us to all the difficulties of tree growing and harvesting from getting the nutrients into the soil till planting and parasite protection. In the afternoon we visited Soporcel’s mill in Figueira da Foz approximately 40 miles southeast from Aveiro where the mill manager gave us a spectacular tour of their facilities. This mill is working solely with eucalyptus producing really high brightness and quality paper that is mostly exported to the US and thanks to its quality the demand for it helped the mill through last year’s recess on the market. This mill uses only 2/3rd of the energy it produces, mainly from burning bark and lignin, and they sell the rest as electrical energy. The mill has two paper machines one of them from Finland the other from Germany they both run approx 1 mile/min and their width is 30 feet. They pay great attention to forming since it is really important to have a good general fiber direction when the paper is used in laser printers, that heat up the paper and bent material can cause jamming. It is also noteworthy that their second machine uses only two shoe-presses but with over 800 kN/m2 pressure by each. We also visited their highly automated packaging and storage facilities where machines work in almost every position instead of humans. We finished our tour with free discussions about paper companies their environmental responsibilities and student questions about planned future changes.

July 27-28, 2009 From Aveiro to Coimbra: 

            On Monday we visited the University of Aveiro (UA), where our host was Dr. Carlos Pascoal Neto who is the head of the Department of Chemistry. They are in close relationship with the Departments of Chemical Engineering, Biochemistry and Biotechnology and they are responsible for the remarkable achievement of most published journals in the area of chemistry per year in Portugal, with around 260 papers from 2008. Dr. Neto is part of the group: “CICECO” that has research areas like composites, ceramics and macromolecular and lignocellulosic research, with industrial partners from the biopolymer, composite, food and pulp and paper sectors. The scope of their lignocellulose research can be divided into two main tasks:

  1. Chemistry and structure of lignocellulosics
  2. Conversion of lignocellulosics to new biomaterials

In the area of forest biorefineries their research focuses on multiple areas from which a few examples are the extraction and conversion of hemicelluloses, acetic acid and furfural extraction and utilization. A short list of their interests is as the following: Eucalyptus globulus heteroxylan and lignin characterization, delignification with polyoxometalates (POM), cellulose fiber based composites, bacterial celluloses, TiO2-cellulose nanocomposites with layer by layer (LbL) assembly (antibacterial properties), chitosan transparent nanocomp. films, super hydrophobic cellulose based materials like cellulose-SiO2-fluorinated nanocomposites, polymers from cork suberines, thermally reversible furan polymers and lignin derived polyols used in polyurethanes.

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        After lunch we gave our seminars on GT/Chemistry/IPST research then we had open discussion about current trends in sustainability in the areas of biorefineries and new biomaterials with great questions and ideas from both professors and students.

            On Tuesday we were hosted by the Chemical Engineering Department of the University of Coimbra (UC) one of the oldest universities of Europe. The hospitality and kindness of our hosts showed from the first moment of our meetings creating a great and welcoming environment for our discussions. First Dr. Paulo Ferreira introduced their department and spoke about their research interests as summarized in the following. UC’s Chemical Engineering Department offers specifications after the 4th year in different areas of paper science. The department mainly consists of two groups namely Chemical Process Engineering and Forest Products Engineering in which a subgroup called Particles, Polymers and Biomaterials Technology has multiple research areas connected to or directly in paper science. Their contribution to the advancement of Portuguese and worldwide pulp and paper research is essential and shows immediately by the fact that they are between the organizers of the 2010 Iberoamerican Congress on Pulp and Paper Research: www.tecnicelpa.com/ciadicyp/2010. After listening to the introduction we held our presentation had lunch and continued on to the more detailed research presented by UC professors and students. Topics were:

  1. Final bleaching stages of Eucalyptus globulus pulps: substitution of the final extraction (E) and clorine-dioxide (D) stages to peroxide (P) enhances physical properties and saves energy.
  2. Multiphase flows: analyzing the flow behaviors and rheology of pulp fiber suspensions with or without different flocculation agents.
  3. Polyoxometalates used in paper surface modifications with cationic starch to increase optical density and to reach better printability through the increase of gamut area.
  4. Wood-PVC composites: Wood-Plastic Composites (WPC) are cheaper then pure plastics, they are composed of wood-flour (prepared or untreated sawdust) and PVC hence their thermal endurance is also better. To enhance their strength properties further they were successfully incorporated wood-flour into a high hydroxyl containing plastic polymer using hydrogen bonding between fibers and plastic.
  5. Development of polymeric nano and micro composites: particles made out of cellulose-acetate-butyrate (CAB) with synthesis by emulsification. They were able to create hollow particles that don’t collapse without solvent and they have control over shape and homogeneity.

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After all presentations we visited the facilities, have an amazing evening with the hosts listening to fado of Coimbra (songs) that is unique to this city and on the next day we had a tour through the buildings of their 700 year old university.

Acknowledgements: The whole GT group is really thankful for the kindness of all organizers, hosts and presenters: 1. University of Beira Interior (Covilha): Dr. Atika Oudia, Dr. Ana Paula Duarte 2. RAIZ (Aveiro): Mr. Gabriel Sousa, Dr. Jose-Luis Amaral 3. University of Aveiro: Dr. Carlos Pascoal Neto, Ms. Sonia Santos, Mr. Ricardo Pinto, Ms. Gisela Cunha, Ms. Dora Coelho 4. University of Coimbra: Dr. Graca Carvalho, Dr. Margarida Figuereido, Dr. Paulo Ferreira, Dr. Antonio Portugal, Dr. Maria da Graca Rasteiro, Dr. Jose Gamelas, Mr. Pedro Loureiro, Mr. Nuno Rocha, Ms. Joana Branquinho

The trip participants would like to truly thank NSF (EEC-0332554) for support of these studies.