Abstract
Chemical purification through ultrasonic treatment as a method to prepare energy-saving and environmentally friendly nanofiber from natural lignocellulose has attracted wide attention in academic research. However, purifying cellulose through chemical pretreatment is complicated and inefficient, making it one of the bottlenecks that plague its industrial application. In this paper, the superextended soda–oxygen pulping process successfully purified rice straw cellulose fibers (total lignin 1.57%). Results showed that 82% of the hemicellulose can be removed with a high yield of 43.05% (w/w dry rice straw). In addition, micro/nanofibers can be isolated from the purified cellulose after the conventional ultrasonic process (2000 W, 2 h). The transmission electron microscope shows that the obtained micro/nanofibers were interconnected with fiber bundles, which formed entangled, weblike networks in the suspension. The thermogravimetric analysis results indicated that the degradation temperature of the micro/nanofibers can be increased to approximately 335 °C compared with that of 300 °C of the conventional pulp. After a simple vacuum filtration, a highly transparent film with a smooth surface was produced from micro/nanofibers. The production process has low cost, stable product quality, and high yield, and it is also easy to use in industrial production.
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