Preparing spherical lignin from rice husk.

Lignin is one of the important branched amorphous polymers, which generally has the irregular and fractal morphology. The preparation of regular sphere of lignin needs long steps and special conditions. In this study, the regular sphere of lignin can be simply prepared from rice husk (RH) under certain conditions. Namely, RH is mixed with 35% ethanol aqueous solution in the proportion of 1:10 (g:mL), non-isothermally heated to 493 K and kept for 5 h. After filtration and air-drying at room temperature, the regular lignin sphere with the diameter of 100-400 nm is obtained. The regular sphere of lignin has the potential utilization in fields such as reactive functional materials, photo sensing materials and surface active materials in cosmetics. The mechanism of formation of the regular spherical lignin is proposed and discussed in this paper.