Firstly introduced in 1980’s, the field of cellulose nanofibrils has seen a recent enthusiasm boom in the past ten years. The applications for cellulose nanofibrils are numerous, for instance active food packaging, cosmetics, wound healing or tissue engineering. Cellulose nanofibrils are produced by mechanical disintegration of the cellulose—based raw materials. Different steps can be defined for the production of CNF. Pretreatments are classically used to enhance the further delamination of the raw material by the principal mechanical treatment. In 2015, Sirviö et al introduced the use of deep eutectic solvents as a new pretreatment for the production of cellulose nanofibrils. Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) are components formed by mixing a hydrogen bond donor and a hydrogen bond acceptor, being associated with each other by hydrogen bond interactions. Same year, the use of twin-screw extrusion (TSE) was introduced by Ho et al. (2015) as a mechanical treatment, and it led to promising results as it enables the processing of high solid contents materials.<br/>The aim of this project was to develop a new process of cellulose nanofibrils production using combination of deep eutectic solvents pretreatments and TSE. The project relied on using a deep eutectic solvent formed by mixing choline chloride (ChCl) and urea to work as a pretreatment of cellulosic fibers.  Different ratios of ChCl and urea were performed and the CNF produced were characterized following a recent quality index strategy using microscopy tools, fibre morphology, turbidity and nanopaper characterization. It was proved that the DES pretreatment was beneficial to obtain MFC after 7 passes and that an optimum ratio (1:2) is obtained regarding energy consumption.<br/>

Cellulose nanofibrils production using deep eutectic solvents and twin screw extrusion

255th National Meeting (2018)

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