Abstract
There is growing interest in cellulose nanowhiskers from renewable sources for several industrial applications. In this work, sisal cellulose nanowhiskers (SCNW) are produced from sisal fiber by the combinations of acid hydrolysis and dialysis treatment. The structure of SCNW is characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), the morphology of SCNW is observed using field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), and the thermal properties of SCNW is investigated by differential thermogravimetric analysis (DTG). The FTIR study displays that the chemical structures of SCNW are consistent with those of cellulose, indicating the removal of most of hemicelluloses during the acid hydrolysis process. The DTG result suggests the initial decomposition temperature of SCNW is 280 °C and the terminal decomposition temperature is 356 °C, the residual rate is 10% or so, indicating favorable thermal performance. The SEM results show that the sisal cellulose microcrystals exhibit an average length of 50 μm and a diameter of 5~10 μm, and SCNW displays a diameter of 5~60 nm and a length of several micrometers, revealing that the size of SCNW is much smaller than that of cellulose microcrystal. All above results illustrate that SCNW has a great promise for many potential applications, such as pharmaceutical, liquid filtration, catalysts, bio-nanocomposites, and tissue engineering scaffolds.
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