Affiliated Professor Petra Mischnick
Personal Information
Affiliated professor at KTH, Fibre and Polymer Technology
Home University: Technische Universität Braunschweig , Germany
Research Profile
Polysaccharides are the most abundant renewable resources. They can be chemically modified to change and tune their properties for a wide range of applications: viscosity control, adhesion, film forming, water binding, controlled release, thermoreversible gelation or fiber formation. These properties are of interest for building, pharma, food, textile, paper, medicine, analytics and other fields. Due to the polyfunctionality of polysaccharides, various patterns of substituents can be established, which beside the average degree of substitution (DS) have a strong influence on the properties like e.g. the gelling temperature of methyl celluloses. - Thus the research aims on the detailed analysis of the substituent distribution in such modified polysaccharides : development of methods, study of the influence of reaction conditions on the substituent patterns, synthesis and characterization of new glucan ethers. The focus is on carbohydrate chemistry, mass spectrometry, chromatography and capillary electrophoresis.
Projects at KTH
Collaboration with PhD student about reactivity studies of spruce glucomannans within the project
Courses and PhD Courses
KF2180 Biopolymers, 7.5 credits
KF3320 Chemical structure analysis of natural and chemically modified polysaccharides, 5 credits
Publications
Other
Chemistry for kids (Student lab)