Ren Junli: Clever Application Of Leather Waste

　　 Ren Jun Li Never intended to position herself as a strong woman, or that she chose all the way out of a natural female thinking.

When it comes to girls' ideal career, the world's top parents must be doctors. Many years ago, this is Ren Junli's yearning. However, a piece of paper dispensed her to the pulp and paper engineering specialty of Shandong Light Industries College. Surprised, Ren Junli chose to accept. In the third year, she began to prepare for postgraduate entrance exams as well as many girls. In September 2001, she joined her beloved tutor, Professor Qiu Huayu.

"Qiu's factory projects were quite numerous at that time, but I think girls are more suitable for the research on partial basis, so my topic is to study how to apply the waste collagen in leather manufacturing process to paper making." Three years later, she was admitted to South China University of Technology under the guidance of China's famous agroforestry expert in biomass chemistry, distinguished professor of Changjiang Scholar, National Outstanding Youth Fund winner, "973" chief scientist, and sun run Cang, director of the National Key Laboratory of pulp and paper engineering, South China University of Technology.

Professor Sun Runcang has long been aiming at the utilization of lignocellulosic biomass resources, and has been working on straw separation since 1996. "This field was not a hot trend in China at that time. It was Mr. Sun who brought me in." Speaking of which, Ren Junli is still very grateful. "All the way, I am a student who listens to the teacher." Because they usually look at the problem from the overall situation of scientific research development, and virtually let me learn a lot of things, but also paved the way for later work.

"Separation, modification and application of hemicellulose from bagasse and wheat straw" is Ren Junli's doctoral dissertation.

Why do we choose hemicelluloses? Hemicellulose is very rich in nature, and its content in plant fiber is 1/4 - 1/3, second only to cellulose content. Moreover, it has unique chemical structure, high environmental value, and has potential commercial value in papermaking, food packaging, biomedicine and other fields. It is recognized as an ideal material for preparing environmentally friendly materials. " Ren Junli was impressed by the charm of hemicellulose. At the same time, she was also born in papermaking profession. She also hoped that it could be used as papermaking auxiliaries in papermaking, so that the papermaking technology with a history of thousand years would be more environmentally friendly in the process of modernization.

Over the past few years, she has come to realize that using biomass to produce bioenergy, biomass based materials and chemicals to supplement or gradually replace non renewable petrochemical resources has become an important trend in the transformation of resources at present, and will promote the benign transformation of the existing large-scale fossil based industrial system to the biomass industry system. The study on the preparation of environmentally friendly adsorbent materials from hemicellulose of agroforestry biomass has provided a new resource way for the high value utilization of agricultural and forestry biomass resources. After graduating from Ph.D. in 2007, she continued to work on the separation of hemicellulose from agricultural and forest biomass and the basic and applied research on the preparation of high value-added hemicellulose based products, hoping to make some progress in this field.

"To be a true person and to do things in a down-to-earth way is what the teacher expects of me." Ren Junli said. "Obedient" she actually has no ambition. She just does her research without distracting thoughts. She will not purposely pursue anything, nor will she be disappointed because she has not got it. Recalling the original intention, she said that this is just a girl's simple idea, "do your best, and let nature take its course".

"Hemicelluloses components clean and efficient separation to establish transformation platform to directional synthesis. Diversification Ren Junli's research thought is very clear.

From her Ph.D. degree, she has gradually studied the separation and transformation of hemicelluloses into functional materials and important platform compound furfural. The hemicellulose was separated from bagasse, wheat straw, corn stalks, and yellow bamboo, and then a series of new theories and methods of environmental friendly functional materials were constructed according to the structure activity relationship of hemicellulose. She established a new technology for separation of hemicelluloses by mechanical pretreatment and chemical methods. The relationship between hemicellulose properties and structure was elucidated, and the relationship between structure and properties of hemicellulose was established. This provides an important theoretical basis for the industrial application of hemicellulose. In addition, from the perspective of molecular structure design, the high value-added hemicellulose based chemicals were also quite commendable.

"I do Hemicellulose From separation to transformation, there is no need to leave the major of pulp and paper making, chemical and chemical engineering, material science and food science. Ren Junli believes that with the development of science and technology, cross disciplinary research is the trend of the times. Researchers also need to explore the inspiration associated with their own academic backgrounds from different disciplines. "My focus now is on the preparation of important platform compounds and hemicellulose composite membrane materials by lignocellulosic catalytic pretreatment."

Unknowingly, Ren Junli has quietly published 65 papers in international journals including SCI, and has been cited by SCI for more than 500 times. Among them, 38 were published by the first author / correspondence author, 7 were published in the first international journal JCR, 7 were 5, 5 more than 2.

Water droplets and stone wears. In 2012, her efforts finally won more opportunities, not only to become the seventh batch of training objects of "the hundred thousand projects" in Guangdong higher education institutions, but also to the Ministry of education, the new century talent support program, the Guangdong Provincial Outstanding Youth Fund Project (first), and the outstanding talents training program of South China University of Technology.

"The world is not weak in the water, but the tough ones can win", to the soft and rigid, for the future scientific research career may encounter difficulties, Ren Jun Li has been prepared for the heart, what she must do now is to seize the opportunity to calm down, for the future, to deliver to every day in the future.