Abstract
It is inherently challenging to recapitulate the precise hierarchical architectures found throughout nature (such as in wood, antler, bone, and silk) using synthetic bottom-up fabrication strategies. However, as a renewable and naturally sourced nanoscale building block, nanocellulose-both cellulose nanocrystals and cellulose nanofibrils-has gained significant research interest within this area. Altogether, the intrinsic shape anisotropy, surface charge/chemistry, and mechanical/rheological properties are some of the critical material properties leading to advanced structure-based functionality within nanocellulose-based bottom-up fabricated materials. Herein, the organization of nanocellulose into biomimetic-aligned, porous, and fibrous materials through a variety of fabrication techniques is presented. Moreover, sophisticated material structuring arising from both the alignment of nanocellulose and via specific process-induced methods is covered. In particular, design rules based on the underlying fundamental properties of nanocellulose are established and discussed as related to their influence on material assembly and resulting structure/function. Finally, key advancements and critical challenges within the field are highlighted, paving the way for the fabrication of truly advanced materials from nanocellulose.
Highlights
D-glucose units and exhibit impressive mechanical properties and tunable surface chemistries
Nature has the innate ability to assemble sophisticated hier- dimensional anisotropy, and natural sourcing of both CNCs archical structures on multiple length scales with remarkable and CNFs, the use of nanocellulose as a functional building functionalities from simple nanoscale building blocks such as block for developing hierarchical assemblies has attracted sigproteins and carbohydrates. This relationship between a mate- nificant research interest. Due to this widespread interest in rial’s macroscale functionality and its nanoscale building blocks nanocellulose, several reviews have previously been published is readily evidenced throughout nature, such as in structures covering the material properties, production, processing, charincluding cellulose, chitin, and acterization strategies, chemical modifications, and potential silk.[1]
Bottom-up fabrication acts to mimic this applications of CNCs and CNFs, to which we direct any interested reader for additional information.[2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]
Summary
D-glucose units and exhibit impressive mechanical properties and tunable surface chemistries. Nature has the innate ability to assemble sophisticated hier- dimensional anisotropy, and natural sourcing of both CNCs archical structures on multiple length scales with remarkable and CNFs, the use of nanocellulose as a functional building functionalities from simple nanoscale building blocks such as block for developing hierarchical assemblies has attracted sigproteins and carbohydrates. This relationship between a mate- nificant research interest. Functional nanocellulose materials are categorized by the primary type of structuring employed during preparation, namely, nanocellulose alignment-induced structuring (Section 2), and material processing-induced structuring (Section 3)
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