Lignin is a byproduct produced from wood delignification and pulping process. The globe annual production of lignin is approximately more than 70 million metric tons. The kraft process is the most widely used pulping process and kraft lignin accounts for more than 90% of the world's chemical pulp lignin production. However, only 1~2% of lignin is isolated from wood pulping for commercial applications, the majority is burned onsite for heat and pulping chemical recovery. With the increasing awareness of environmental issues and the depletion of fossil fuels, there is a tremendous globe research interest in utilizing biomass like lignin for the production of sustainable and renewable fuels and chemicals and carbon-based nanomaterials like active carbons, carbon fibers, templated carbon, graphene and carbon foams through thermal conversion technologies.

A novel method was developed by scientists at FPL and Ligsteel LLC to produce high-value carbon foams using lignin resources. Lignin is composing 100% carbon resource in this innovative process. The resultant carbon foam has a regular open-cell structure. Densities of the carbon foam products are generally in the range of about 0.01 g/cm3 to 1.0 g/cm3. The carbon foams exhibit compressive strengths of up to about 100 MPa. A batch type manufacturing process has been developed for converting Domtar BioChoice lignin to carbon foams. The recently developed batch processes demonstrate high carbon conversion and carbonaceous materials yield (> 55% C in graphene products and > 65% C in carbon foam products), but have low production rate; about 100 g graphene material is produced daily over the batch type manufacturing system in FPL.

Therefore, a research project was developed to investigate semi-continuous manufacturing modes and to demonstrate that both graphene and carbon foam production processes are scalable for high-volume production of valuable carbonaceous materials from lignin. Searching for the potential large volume applications of lignin-derived carbonaceous materials is another objective of current project.

The purpose of this contract is to use Ligsteel expertise to advance our co-patented technology to develop high-value and high-volume applications for abundant lignin.

The Government intends to award a fimr-fixed price Purchase Order to LigSteel, funded from soft dollars and not governed by Federal Acquisition Regulations.

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