Abstract
Nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) is a promising candidate for the development of high-performance renewable packaging. The water vapour permeability (WVP) of NFC sheets can be improved with the addition of inorganic nanoparticles such as montmorillonite nanoclay (MMT). However, these nanoparticles reduce the already poor sheet drainage when layers are formed through vacuum filtration. Spray-coating, on the other hand, is a recently developed rapid method for sheet formation. However, higher WVP of spray-coated NFC sheets compared to its vacuum filtered counterpart still remains a limitation. This work reports a new method for spray-coating a NFC-MMT composite sheet to improve both the ease of preparation and WVP barrier performance. Critically, the WVP of CNF sheets could be significantly reduced by processing the CNF-MMT suspension in a high-pressure homogenizer prior to spray-coating. X-ray diffraction measurements confirmed that the MMT particles were aligned in the plane of the sheet and were strongly interacting with the NFC matrix. At the optimal MMT loading of 20 wt%, WVP of 8.3 × 10−12 g/m s Pa was achieved. This resulted in comparable barrier performance to vacuum filtered NFC-MMT sheets, with the added benefit of being much easier to produce. Furthermore, spray-coating with 2 wt% suspension reduces the required water removal during drying by almost 90% (291 tonne water/tonne dry NFC product), compared to forming equivalent sheets using vacuum filtration at 0.3 wt%. The spray-coating process is of industrial interest as it is scalable and it is easy to engineer the properties of the NFC composites by varying the MMT content.
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Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Research Council, Australian Paper, Carter Holt Harvey, Circa, Norske Skog and Visy through the Industry Transformation Research Hub Grant IH130100016. The use of facilities of the Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy are acknowledged. The authors would like to thank to Dr. Xi-Ya Fang for her help with investigating the cross-sectional view of spray coated nanocomposites under an SEM. The authors also acknowledge the use of facilities within the Monash X-Ray Platform at Monash University, Australia.
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Shanmugam, K., Ang, S., Maliha, M. et al. High-performance homogenized and spray coated nanofibrillated cellulose-montmorillonite barriers. Cellulose 28, 405–416 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-020-03515-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-020-03515-w