Deep Eutectic Solvents for Green Extraction, Biomass Pretreatment, and Sustainable Separation
This research community develops and applies deep eutectic solvents (DES) and natural deep eutectic solvents (NaDES) as green, recyclable media for extracting bioactive compounds, pretreating lignocellulosic biomass, and performing chemical separations.
The work centers on designing solvent mixtures, frequently using choline chloride paired with acids like lactic acid or ethylene glycol, to replace conventional organic solvents. Key applications include the extraction of phenolic compounds, antioxidants, and polysaccharides from plant materials and food by-products, as well as the pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass to enhance enzymatic hydrolysis for bioethanol production. Methods span molecular dynamics simulations to optimize solvent structure, liquid-liquid microextraction for analytical chemistry, and extractive distillation for industrial separation. The emphasis is on sustainability, with a focus on green synthesis, solvent recyclability, and the reduction of hazardous waste in chemical processing.
The community is most heavily represented in research tracked for chlorine, accounting for 0.7% of all chlorine-related papers, followed by bromine at 0.3%. It also contributes to research on hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, each representing 0.1% of their respective element research.
There are 5,905 papers in this community, with the highest publication volumes in the Journal of Molecular Liquids, Separation and Purification Technology, and Food Chemistry.
Recent work continues to focus on optimizing DES for biomass pretreatment to improve bioethanol yields, developing sustainability assessment frameworks for solvent selection, and applying these solvents to the extraction of specific polysaccharides and polyphenols from agricultural residues.