Mountains of Waste Could Lead to New U.S. Manufacturing, Jobs

by Kathleen Phillips (AgriLife Today) Waste material from the paper and pulp industry soon could be made into anything from tennis rackets to cars.

“We have overcome one of the industry’s most challenging issues by discovering how to make good quality carbon fiber from waste,” said Dr. Joshua Yuan, Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientist and associate professor of plant pathology and microbiology in College Station.

The research was published recently in Green Chemistry, the peer-reviewed journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

“People have been thinking about using lignin to make carbon fiber for many years, but achieving good quality has been an issue,” Yuan said.

Carbon fiber is not a new concept. It has been toyed with since 1860 — mostly for light bulbs originally — and is known for high strength, low weight and heat tolerance.

“If you cannot produce quality carbon material, it’s really not useful,” Yuan said.

“What we found is that lignin is a mixture of many molecules of many sizes and different chemical properties. Through fractionation, we separated lignin into different parts, and then we found that certain parts of lignin are very good for high quality carbon fiber manufacturing,” he explained.

The researcher noted that lignin is a complex molecule, but when the high-density, high molecular weight portion is separated from the rest, it has a uniform structure that allows the formation of high quality carbon fiber. READ MORE and MORE (Ethanol Producer Magazine) Abstract (Green Chemistry)