| Rising prices of petroleum based chemicals has forced industry to look at alternative materials such as biomass to derive useful chemicals for a variety of applications. Therefore, in an attempt to alleviate this burden, studies of a variety of chemicals derived from biomass sources such as corn have been taken on. These studies include the synthesis of starch-g-PMMA by photoinitiated emulsion polymerization, Synthesis of difuran derivatives from furfural and furan based chemicals, and the synthesis of furfural from xylose in subcritical water/NaCl/supercritical carbon dioxide mixtures. These systems have been analyzed with a variety of methods including gravimetric methods, GC/MS, NMR, and HPLC to determine appropriate conditions for synthesis. First, it was found the starch-g-PMMA could be formed via emulsion photopolymerization and factors such as irradiation time, starch type, and initiator use effect the properties of the graft copolymer formed. Second, it was found that difuran derivative synthesis was not trivial as once reported in literature and functional groups, UV absorbance of reactants, and concentration dictate the success of the reactions. Third, synthesis of furfural from xylose was performed and it was determined that scCO2 mole % and NaCl effect the yields achieved by reactions which were performed a temperatures of 250, 275, 300, 325, and 350°C. All of these projects had one goal in mind; provide a green economical method to synthesize high value chemicals from biomass, and those goals were accomplished each of the systems. |
