A New Biorefinery Approach for Production of Lignin-Carbohydrate Functional Hybrids

Traditional biorefineries focus on maximal separation of the main biomass components to produce the highest purity of biorefinery products assuming their best application performance. However, recent studies demonstrated advanced performance of lignin-carbohydrate mixtures in specific applications implying lignin-carbohydrate synergism. Examples of lignin-carbohydrate hybrids (LCHs) include various lignin-carbohydrate complexes (LCCs), where lignin and carbohydrate are chemically linked, physical mixtures of lignin and crystalline cellulose (CelloLignins and LignoCelluloses) as well as their combinations. Therefore, it makes sense optimizing different biorefinery processes for the best performance of these LCHs thus avoiding severe, expensive and often environmentally damaging purification of the biorefinery streams. Herein, we present a green, simple, and flexible biorefinery concept for integrated utilization of all major biomass components for high-value applications with the focus on lignin-carbohydrate functional hybrids (LCHs). The suggested biorefinery concept allows much greater flexibility in optimizing LCH characteristics desirable for specific applications than traditional pulping processes. Such LCH engineering, at the same time, requires an efficient strategy capable of handling large datasets to find correlations between process variables, LCH composition, structures and properties and finally their performance in different applications.