After one year of life, the first public deliverables of NewWave are available. These documents provide some initial insights on specific project activities that wil lbe further developed in the next three years, so for the meantime you can read the updated in the following documents.
D3.1 – Production and delivery of polyols
D3.1 is the first of three deliverables describing the production and delivery of polyol samples. This document describes the first polyol samples produced and delivered to the relevant project partners in the period M1-M12. The polyols were produced at BTG, by the hydrogenation of pyrolysis oil or the pyrolytic sugars. The hydrogenation was executed in bench-scale or pilot-scale hydrotreaters applying the patented Ni-based PICULA (TM) catalyst. After hydrogenation of the feed, different post treatments/purification steps were applied to remove impurities. The eight polyol samples produced were sent to partner AEP to be tested in different polyurethane applications.
D5.1 – Development of new plywood resins
This report summarizes the experimental work performed in the activities of “Lignin characterization” and “Resin screening tests”. Four lignin samples were received from BTG and have been analyzed. The samples have been characterized by measuring the necessary parameters for the implementation and subsequent replacement of phenol in the resin screening tests.
Parameters such as the; water content, density, viscosity, pH, % of phenol, elemental analysis (C,H,N), GPC & metal content have been analyzed. Furthermore, to be able to understand the reactivity of the samples, thermal degradation, calorimetry scanning differential and curing ramp analyses were performed as well. Noteworthy is that during the analysis and testing the samples showed to be very homogeneous, which is not always the case with lignins and lignin derived materials.
Regarding the resin screening test, a recipe was developed, and a 100 % phenol-formaldehyde resin was synthesized to be used as a blank to compare with resins with incorporated lignin to replace the phenol. The different lignin samples provided by BTG were tested as phenol substitutes in amounts/percentages of 25, 50 & 75%. All the resin synthesis reactions could be carried out without problems in the polymerization step, except for resins with 75% phenol substitution by the solid lignin samples.
Due to the solid lignin, the viscosity became too high in the reactor during resin synthesis, hindering polymerization.
The synthesized resins have been analyzed to obtain information required for evaluation in following sub-tasks. The replacement of 100% of the phenol in the resin by the different lignin’s provided by BTG is still ongoing.
