Contribution of LDI and MALDI for the Characterization of a Lignocellulosic-Based Pyrolysis Bio-Oil.

In recent years, various alternatives to fossil fuels have been developed. One of them involves the production of bio-oils from lignocellulosic-based biomass through pyrolysis. However, bio-oils present numerous heteroatoms and, in particular, oxygen atoms that need to be removed by an upgrading process. To optimize these processes, it is necessary to have good knowledge of the composition of the bio-oils at the molecular level. This work aims to establish the usefulness of laser desorption ionization (LDI) and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) techniques on lignocellulosic biomass-based bio-oils. Using a Fourier transform ion cyclotron mass spectrometer (FTICR MS), we showed that MALDI gives more information than LDI. The selectivity of a series of MALDI matrices was investigated, showing that some matrices are selective toward compound families and others ionize a wider range of compounds. In this study, nine proton-transfer matrices and three electron-transfer matrices were used and compared to results obtained in LDI. Dithranol, acetosyringone, and graphene oxide were the three promising matrices selected from all matrices, giving an overall characterization of oxygenated classes in a bio-oil. They allowed the ionization of many more species covering a wide range of polarity, aromaticity, and mass with a homogeneous relative intensity for all molecular classes such as lignin-derivative species, sugars, and lipid-derivative species.

Mechanistic study of maleic anhydride grafting onto fatty double bonds using mass spectrometry.

RATIONALE: The grafting of maleic anhydride onto fatty C=C double bonds is a well-known and used method to functionalize triglyceride molecules. Nevertheless, grafted products are not actually structurally well defined. In this work, the thermal grafting of maleic anhydride onto (un)saturated fatty acid esters without the use of an initiator was characterized in order to determine the nature of the products formed during this reaction. METHODS: Complementary spectrometric techniques, ESI-MS(n) (ion-trap mass spectrometer), IMS-MS(n) (Q-IMS-TOFMS) and GC/MS, were used to identify the grafted products which were prepared using either ethyl oleate (EtO) or methyl linoleate (MeL) as model molecules and maleic anhydride (MA). Lithiated adducts were investigated since they yield useful structural information when subjected to collision-induced dissociation (CID) in tandem mass spectrometry. RESULTS: A high number of products are formed during MA grafting and various reaction types could occur. Radical addition of maleic anhydride followed by combination or elimination reactions led to succinic and maleic anhydride grafting, respectively. The addition occurred with or without double-bond shift; the resulting derivatives showed succinic and maleic anhydride branching in the α-position relative to the double bond or onto the carbon atom of the initial double bond. Some structures obtained by radical addition and combination were also consistent with the Alder ene functionalization reaction. The Diels-Alder addition between di-unsaturated fatty acid chains and maleic anhydride could yield cyclic forms of MA-grafted derivatives. CONCLUSIONS: We have shown that ESI-MS(n) and IMS-MS(n) allow the identification of grafted products providing relevant structural information concerning isomers. These methods permit the rapid and direct analyses of 'crude reaction mixtures'.