Biopolymers

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The course aims at providing a detailed overview of carbohydrates as biobased materials. There are many obvious materials that are already in industrial use, like hemicellulose, cellulose and starch. These polysaccharide materials are widely used for a large number of applications. However, there is also another large field of carbohydrate research that uses lactic- and/or glycolic acid. These can be used to produce polymers of which the properties can be fine-tuned by using different techniques and technologies. In this course an expert from this field will introduce the industrial use and application of poly-lactides. Also the design and synthesis routes for new carbohydrate building blocks will be studied. Description of skills training during the course: During the course there will be laboratory sessions on the isolation and production of different carbohydrate biobased materials. The students will work together with an external expert in designing their own experiments on structure-function relations of synthetic carbohydrate polymers, i.e. poly-lactic acid, poly-glycolic acid and/or synthesis of new blends (using for instance starch, chitosan, etc.).