FRACTION is a European research project funded by the Bio Based Industries Joint Undertaking (JU) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
FRACTION develops a novel integrated biorefinery approach to maximize the purity and quality of lignin and hemicellulose side streams in 2nd generation biorefineries to achieve its use in the formulation of high added value products, while keeping high quality cellulose as main targeted product.
This will be achieved thanks to a novel organosolv fractionation process using a mixture of ɣ-valerolactone (GVL) and water, followed by downstream processing and purification technologies aimed to produce high quality end products making the most out of all the lignocellulose components.
The uniqueness of this project is the outstanding performance of GVL-based fractionation, including solvent recovery and reutilisation. The use of GVL as a solvent offers unique advantages to the process by the virtue of its chemical and physical properties and solves problems associated with biomass fractionation, such as:
- continuous biomass feeding
- high biomass loading
- low degradation of all three streams – cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin
- the ability to effectively process the hemicellulose stream downstream within the solvent
Project acronym: FRACTION
Project title: Novel lignocellulose fractionation process for high purity lignin, hemicellulose and cellulose valorisation into added value products
Grant agreement number: 101023202
Duration: 01/06/2021 to 31/05/2024
Website: https://fraction-project.eu/