Astronium urundeuva wood is well known due to its very good mechanical, biological and chemical resistance and therefore it is widely used in Brazil1. In spite of this, we could not find any systematic study on the chemical composition of this wood in the literature. In order to investigate whether there is a relationship between resistance and chemical constitution, we have initiated studies to characterize the polyphenols and the lignin structure of this wood.
To obtain a lignin mostly free of polyphenol contamination, we employed the Björkmann procedure adapted for Eucalyptus grandis wood cultivated in the central region of Brazil. This wood also contains a large amount of polyphenols2.
Polyphenol studies were carried out using classical chemical techniques3-7 associated with modern high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)8-13 and high resolution liquid and solid state 13C-NMR11,14,15 and FTIR spectroscopies.