Assessment of eucalypts wood lignin content by analytical pyrolysis, comparison with Klason and total lignin contents

Abstract

Analytical pyrolysis can be used to determine the lignin content (Py-lignin) in eucalypt woods with a precision (0.37%) similar to the wet reference methods. Good correlations were found between the Py-lignin results and Klason (94%) and total lignin contents (95%). Besides apparent species-specific deviations, an average difference of 1.3% compared to the total lignin content was observed, well below the 3.9% difference reported for softwoods (guaiacyl lignin). Since Eucalyptus has more syringyl (S) than guaiacyl (G) units, this suggests that S units are overestimated in comparison to G units by analytical pyrolysis, in line with previous findings for different degradation methods, including pyrolysis.

Keywords:

• Eucalyptus genus
• total lignin
• Klason lignin
• Py-lignin

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Carlos Arévalo, Javier Oberschelp, Pablo Pathauer, Leonel Harrand, Mauricio Moran, Dino Palazzini and Juan López, for providing wood samples within the scope of two projects BIOTECH-MERCOSUR-UE 127118 -3.2 and BiotecSurII. Selección acelerada de Eucalyptus para bioenergía de los programas de mejoramiento forestal del MERCOSUR (ER EuropeAid/136457/ID/ACT/Multi). This research was funded by the Forest Research Centre, a research unit funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia I.P. (FCT), Portugal (UIDB/00239/2020). The first author was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P, through a contract: DL57/2016/CP1382/CT0005.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.