Forestry resources have traditionally been used for lumber, fuel and as raw material for paper. Now, however, there is a shift in which the forestry and chemical industries are beginning to approach one another, not least via a number of exciting projects focused on utilizing every aspect and by-product of lumber and paper production, including the waste material. Much of what is today regarded as waste will in future be used as the basis for new materials as former paper mills are developed into cutting-edge bio-refineries. In this way, the forestry industry may help reduce oil consumption.

On Friday December 11 at Chalmers University of Technology. Åsa Östlund defended her dissertation entitled “Physico-Chemical Properties of Plant Polysaccharides Investigated with NMR Techniques". In her research, Åsa Östlund has examined the properties of polysaccharides in a variety of contexts. Polysaccharides may be a significant building-block for future biomaterials and research may therefore provide valuable know-how.

During the pulp production process, for instance, a number of different polysaccharides are released, and these are potential building-blocks in material production. Polysaccharides are a generic name for long chains of different types of sugar molecules.

One stage in developing good biomaterials is to be able to determine the properties of the material´s building-blocks, that is to say the polysaccharides. In this dissertation, polysaccharide properties were studied in a solution, as a gel and in their more original form in paper fibre.

Studies have been conducted using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), a technique that among other things provides information about molecule dynamics in chains of different lengths, at molecular level, on the nanometer scale and finally at millimetre level. This is important in order to fully understand the properties of the polysaccharides.

Biomaterial from forest and plant life can be used in everything from hard composite materials to thin transparent packaging. Different biomaterials have distinct properties that allow them to be used for instance in implants and their gel-binding ability can, among much else, be utilised in the pharmaceutical industry in applications requiring the controlled release of medication from a tablet. The fibre raw material itself has many useful qualities and one of them is its porous structure, offering excellent absorption ability. This is of considerable value in applications such as diapers. The properties of the product are determined primarily by its structure at molecular level and the way it interacts with water.

For more information, please contact: Åsa Östlund, phone: +46 31-772 29 83, email asa.ostlund@chalmers.se

Source: Chalmers, www.papernet.se