Abstract
The enzymatic hydrolysis of polyamides offers a promising approach to reduce the environmental impact of chemical recycling by enabling lower reaction temperatures, eliminating toxic organic solvents, and enhancing product selectivity. Achieving this goal will require increasing the low overall yield of enzymatic hydrolysis. In this work, we studied the mechanism of hydrolysis of commercial Nylon-6,6 polymer with a thermostable Nylon hydrolyzing enzyme and identified the substrate characteristics that influence the efficiency and deconstruction product yield. These results will guide the development of effective substrate pre-treatment methods to improve the yield of valuable oligoamide building blocks via enzymatic hydrolysis.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1858-1868 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Polymer Chemistry |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 16 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 21 2025 |
Funding
Research was sponsored by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725, for the U.S. Department of Energy. This research used resources from the Compute and Data Environment for Science (CADES) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility for access to additional supercomputing resources. The enzyme/Nylon modeling work is part of a user project at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS), a US Department of Energy, Office of Science User Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We thank Luigi Balzano from DMS Engineering Plastics and Wim Bras from Oak Ridge National Laboratory for providing the Nylon-6,6 pellets.