Infra Red Evaluation of Sodium Lignosulfonate Surfactant (SLS)

Abstract

Bagasse is a waste of sugar cane liquid extraction process, after the sugar manufacturing process. The bagasse still contains29.46 %  of  lignin component. Sodium lignosulfonate is a product of lignin sulfonationisolation process by sodium bisulfite as sulfonation agent. The advantage of lignosulfonateover synthetic surfactant and petroleum-based surfactant is that it is not toxic and it is derived from renewable natural materials. Lignosulfonate is one type of anionic surfactant that can be used as injection fluid in enhanced oil recovery technique in the upstreamoil industry.In this research, the result of the sulfonation process of lignocellulose from bagasse was characterized by Fourier Transform Infra-Red (FTIR) spectroscopy method to determine the typical functional groups in the lignosulfonate structure, which identified that thesulfonate has a chemical formula of C-SO₂-O-C. In this research, we used the data from Aldrich and Patricia as  thecommercial lignosulfonate references. Compared with thereference, the value of sulfonate SLS appeared at the wavenumber of 1384.64 cm^-1, where sulfonate component was formed at the wavenumber of 1365 cm^-1 (Aldrich) or 1350 cm^-1 (Patricia).The conclusion of this research is thatbagasse can be processed into surfactant sodium lignosulfonate, using sodium bisulphate, which have sulfonate component appearing at the wavenumber of 1384.64 cm^-1 that matches with standard lignosulfonate. From the FTIR test,, we have identifiedthree mainlignin components ,i.e, Fenolic, Alifatic and Keton, and  four main lignosulfonate component ,i.e., Alkena, Sulfate, carboxylic Acids and Ester.