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Individual cotton cellulose nanofibers: pretreatment and fibrillation technique

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Abstract

We report a method to fibrillate raw dried cotton fibers into individual cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) by chemical purification (removal of non-cellulosic components) and pretreatment by a high-speed blender (breaking down the fiber structures) combined with high-pressure homogenization (nanofibrillation). The resultant CNFs were found to have a width of approximately 10–30 nm and high aspect ratios. The high light transmittance of the CNF/acrylic resin composite indicated that our treatment successfully disintegrated the raw cotton fibers into uniform CNFs. The cotton CNFs were found to have the advantages of high crystallinity and thermal stability.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr Thi Thu Thao Ho, of the Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere, Kyoto University, for her kind help in using a high-pressure homogenizer, and for fruitful discussions on the data analysis. We are also grateful to thank Dr Yoshiki Horikawa, of the Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere, Kyoto University, for the staining of the TEM samples. Wenshuai Chen was also partially supported by the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-10-0313), China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere, Kyoto University, Uji, 611-0011, Japan

    Wenshuai Chen, Kentaro Abe, Kojiro Uetani & Hiroyuki Yano

  2. Key Laboratory of Bio-based Material Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, 150040, China

    Wenshuai Chen, Haipeng Yu & Yixing Liu

Authors
  1. Wenshuai Chen
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  2. Kentaro Abe
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  3. Kojiro Uetani
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  4. Haipeng Yu
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  5. Yixing Liu
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  6. Hiroyuki Yano
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Correspondence to Hiroyuki Yano.

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Chen, W., Abe, K., Uetani, K. et al. Individual cotton cellulose nanofibers: pretreatment and fibrillation technique. Cellulose 21, 1517–1528 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-014-0172-z

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