Purify cellulosic sugars

The biorefinery is a recognized approach for transforming renewable raw materials into biobased process streams, and ultimately chemicals and fuels. Developing broad based technologies capable of producing families of high value chemicals will provide a significant opportunity for the biorefinery. The starting block of the biorefinery is the breakdown of ligno-cellulosic biomass into cellulosic sugars by hydrolysis. However, different type of feedstock contain different composition of monomeric C5/C6 sugars (xylose, arabinose, mannose, galactose or glucose). This distribution is critical for production yields and process economics. Indeed, C5/C6 sugars provide the highest value when they are isolated and purified into separate components. Therefore, this project will focus on the purification and separation of hemicellulosic sugars to improve the quality of a biomass hydrolysate.