Abstract
The present research has primarily focused on the production of nanofibrillated lignocellulose (NFLC) instead of nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC), which could be produced with less energy and is expected to have similar uses as NFC, especially in the sectors where the transparency is not important. Furthermore, the effect of energy consumption needed for NFLC production and also the influence of pulping methods on the produced NFLC properties has been surveyed. Through mechanical refining and different passes in microfluidizer, the results showed the average diameter of NFLC declined from around 19000 nm to 36 nm. Soda-NFLC films had higher calliper and lower roughness, compared to those of MEA at given energy consumption in refiner and microfluidizer. For both kinds of pulps, the optimum level of energy consumption to reach the best tensile index of NFLC films was 258 kWh/t, with three passes through microfluidizer. More increase in the number of passes and pressure only resulted in increasing of energy consumption without any positive effect on improving the tensile index. The maximum tensile indices of NFLC films obtained from soda and MEA pulping processes were 113.5 and 119.86 N·m/g, respectively. The burst index of 8.5 kP·m2/g and the energy consumption of 458 kWh/t were obtained for five passes through microfluidizer. With the increase of the number of passes of soda and MEA samples through microfluidizer, the opacity decreased but transparency increased.
Highlights
The present research has primarily focused on the production of nanofibrillated lignocellulose (NFLC) instead of nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC), which could be produced with less energy and is expected to have similar uses as NFC, especially in the sectors where the transparency is not important
Through mechanical refining and different passes in microfluidizer, the results showed the average diameter of NFLC declined from around 19000 nm to 36 nm
The results showed that the production of NFLC from pulp obtained by MEA method leads to better properties with less energy consumption compared to the soda pulp production method
Summary
Lignocellulosic sector is capable to produce new high-tech products and create markets with a wide variety of applications. One of these new high-tech products is nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) (Ankerfor, 2012). The development of NFC was pioneered by Turbak et al in 1983.They demonstrated that, by treating woodbased cellulose fiber suspensions with a high-pressure homogenizer, a gel-like material can be produced (Turbak et al.,1983; Zimmerman, 2010; Spence et al, 2011a). The resulting material was denoted as Microfibrillated Cellulose (MFC) or Nanofibrillated Cellulose (NFC), and it showed promising properties and high potential to produce diverse industrial and commercial goods such as cosmetics, health, food, packaging, etc (Abdul Khalil et al, 201; Henrik et al, 2008; Yousefi et al, 2011; Spence, 2011)
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