Methodologies providing new insights into the fundamentals of the pulping process.

Due to rasing issues of environmental polution by non-renewable fossil-based materials, a big interest is placed into development of materials made of natural sources such as wood. For production of advance materials it is important to understand the structure of the wood building block – wood cell, and how it can be impacted by the existing extraction processes. So far, many studies were performed in this direction, but they all are too selective on some parts of the wood cell, may affect wood cell structure and often focus on evaluation of the cell after treatment. To avoid such impacts and bring new insights into fundamentals of pulping process, synchrotron facilites are proposed to be used. To study wood digestion in situ a specially designed reactor would be combined with SAXS/WAXS. 3D nanotomography of single wood cell is used to evaluate the structure before and after extraction processes avoiding impact of nanoslicing.