Surface and Interface Engineering for Nanocellulosic Advanced Materials

Abstract

How do trees support their upright massive bodies? The support comes from the incredibly strong and stiff, and highly crystalline nanoscale fibrils of extended cellulose chains, called cellulose nanofibers. Cellulose nanofibers and their crystalline parts—cellulose nanocrystals, collectively nanocelluloses, are therefore the recent hot materials to incorporate in man‐made sustainable, environmentally sound, and mechanically strong materials. Nanocelluloses are generally obtained through a top‐down process, during or after which the original surface chemistry and interface interactions can be dramatically changed. Therefore, surface and interface engineering are extremely important when nanocellulosic materials with a bottom‐up process are fabricated. Herein, the main focus is on promising chemical modification and nonmodification approaches, aiming to prospect this hot topic from novel aspects, including nanocellulose‐, chemistry‐, and process‐oriented surface and interface engineering for advanced nanocellulosic materials. The reinforcement of nanocelluloses in some functional materials, such as structural materials, films, filaments, aerogels, and foams, is discussed, relating to tailored surface and/or interface engineering. Although some of the nanocellulosic products have already reached the industrial arena, it is hoped that more and more nanocellulose‐based products will become available in everyday life in the next few years.

Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Nanocellulose-Stabilized Pickering Emulsions

“…Nanocellulose (NC) extracted from renewable resources has opened new opportunities for future Pickering emulsion development owing to its intrinsic biodegradability and renewability. Through chemical modifications [6] or grafting techniques with fatty acids, the surface wettability of NC in organic solvents [7,8] can be modified, thereby enhancing the emulsion stability. In addition, NC can be rendered with hydrophobic behaviors to bend the oil-water interface towards the water phase for the formation of reverse Pickering emulsions (or so-called water-in-oil Pickering emulsions) [9].…”

Integrated Conductive Hybrid Electrode Materials Based on PPy@ZIF-67-Derived Oxyhydroxide@CFs Composites for Energy Storage

“…Cellulose fibers (CFs) as superior flexible substrate materials contain rich hydroxyl functional groups and abundant raw material sources, are environmentally friendly, sustainable, light-weight, high-strength, low-cost, recyclable and have good flexibility. Therefore, we select them as substrate materials [ 19 , 20 , 21 ]. The porous and rough surface structure provides excellent substrate materials for the loading of electrode materials and the construction of flexible SCs.…”

Adsorption of Cellulases on BHKP Fibers during Pretreatment for MFC Film Preparation

“…Some researchers used CNFs as a reinforcing phase to produce nanocellulosereinforced biocomposite by casting technology, which enhanced the comprehensive performance of starch films (X. Yang et al 2020). The hybrids were synthesized by coprecipitation of cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) and supermagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (Fe3O4 NPs).…”

“…CNFs film grafting with aminosilanes naphthalene generated CO2 adsorbent composite membrane which exhibits high thermal stability and CO2 adsorption performance (X. Yang et al 2020). High-performance supercapacitors were produce by incorporating graphene beaded carbon nanofibers, zinc oxide and polyaniline nanometers into composite films as high-performance supercapacitors (Atram et al 2019).…”

“…Many other MFC or CNF-based films have also been modified for sustainable packaging, water treatment, energy storage and even biomedical tissue engineering (Assis et al 2020;Tong et al 2020;H. Tu et al 2020;X. Yang et al 2020), Since the properties of MFC have a major and direct impact on the performance of MFC-based films, it is necessary and significant to study the characteristics of materials and methods in MFC preparation.…”