Combination of LC-UV/MS and chemometrics to understand lignocellulosic biomass reactivity

IFP Energies nouvelles (IFPEN) est un acteur majeur de la recherche et de la formation dans les domaines de l’énergie, du transport et de l’environnement. De la recherche à l’industrie, l’innovation technologique est au cœur de son action, articulée autour de quatre priorités stratégiques : Mobilité Durable, Energies Nouvelles, Climat / Environnement / Economie circulaire et Hydrocarbures Responsables.

Dans le cadre de la mission d’intérêt général confiée par les pouvoirs publics, IFPEN concentre ses efforts sur :

l’apport de solutions aux défis sociétaux de l’énergie et du climat, en favorisant la transition vers une mobilité durable et l’émergence d’un mix énergétique plus diversifié ;
la création de richesse et d’emplois, en soutenant l’activité économique française et européenne et la compétitivité des filières industrielles associées.

Partie intégrante d’IFPEN, l’école d’ingénieurs IFP School prépare les générations futures à relever ces défis.

Combination of LC-UV/MS and chemometrics to understand lignocellulosic biomass reactivity.

To combat climate change and propose alternatives to oil and gas, IFPEN develops new processes to produce biofuels and chemical intermediates from lignocellulosic biomass. One of the conversion processes of the biomass involves a pretreatment step producing a solid phase, mainly composed of cellulose, and an aqueous phase that contains hundreds of oxygenated molecules such as carbohydrates, phenols, or carboxylic acids…

Detailed knowledge about the chemical composition such as bioproducts is crucial for the development of new and efficient processes and catalysts.

Hyphenation between liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry and UV spectroscopy (LC-UV/MS) plays a key role to deal with the high chemical complexity of these oxygenated matrices and to reveal their molecular composition. The analysis generates many data, and the manual exploration is time consuming. Therefore, the use of chemometrics is of interest to get an in-depth and relevant interpretation of experimental data coming from biomass samples.

The final objective is to identify which compounds drive biomass products reactivity by combining LC-UV/MS and chemometrics.

Description

The internship will contribute to the final objective through 3 main steps:

Measure of the reactivity of the liquid biomass samples following an experimental protocol using UV spectroscopy.
Complete the LC-UV/MS database already available. Only a few acquisitions will be completed during the internship, which will allow to better understand the origin of the LC-UV/MS data.
Optimization of the dataset preparation phase.

A large part of the internship will be dedicated to the evaluation and comparison of different tools (technical software, MATLAB PLS_Toolbox) adapted to the preparation of the dataset before chemometric analysis (alignment, blank traction, normalization...).