Project R-14623

Revolutionizing Biopolymer Recovery: A Comprehensive Study on Sustainable Extraction and Processing of Suberin and Cutin using Switchable DES (Research)

In this project, we aim to utilize switchable Natural Deep Eutectic solvents (NADES) to extract both polar and apolar compounds from biomass as part of a larger biorefinery scheme for suberin and cutin recovery. This pre-treatments allows for a green and sustainable manner of extract a range of useful compounds from underutilized products while also enabling the extraction of pure suberin, cutin and their monomers. Following this, focus would shift to recovering the polymeric materials themselves and optimizing the extraction procedure, once again utilizing DES. Suberin and cutin are chemically similar materials, meaning that potentially a universal procedure could be developed to recover both materials from different sources. Following this a thorough analysis and characterization would be performed, highlighting the differences in the resulting material when varying experimental parameters. The resulting polymeric materials would then be used to produce a hydrophobic films which would be characterized to quantify their mechanical and barrier properties. Depolymerization utilizing DES is another avenue of research to be explored to provide more sustainable methods of accessing the vast diversity of interesting monomers present. The resulting mixture would be characterized light of maximized extraction yields.

01 December 2023 - 30 November 2027