A finger-jointing model for describing ultrastructures of cellulose microfibrils.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, we propose a finger-jointing model to describe the possible ultrastructures of cellulose microfibrils based on new observations obtained through heating of 2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidine-1-oxyl (TEMPO) oxidized cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) in saturated water vapor. We heated the micrometers-long TEMPO-CNFs in saturated water vapor (≥ 120 °C, ≥ 0.2 MPa) and observed a surprising fact that the long TEMPO-CNFs unzipped into short (100 s of nanometers long) fibers. We characterized the heated TEMPO-CNFs using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and observed the XRD patterns were in consistent with Iβ. We observed also jointed ultrastructures on the heated TEMPO-CNFs via high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM). Thus we concluded that cellulose microfibrils are not seamlessly

SUBMITTER: Fugetsu B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8115659 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature