Creating industrially relevant cellulose reference materials for environmental, health and safety evaluations
There is an immediate need for cellulose nanofibril references and standards to support environmental, health and safety evaluations, product and application development of next-generation composite materials. A new paper outlines our recent work to develop systematically oxidized and well-characterized reference materials from industrially relevant dissolving pulp.
Mechanical degradation of wood pulp, plus chemical oxidation and derivatization of the hydroxyl groups that hold the cellulose structure together, provides a commercially attractive approach to create nano- to micron-scale forms of carboxylated cellulose that can be used as performance-enhancing additives in a wide range of applications. However, the cellulose nanofibrils that result have different physical, chemical, and potential safety profiles depending on the details of the processing method. Standard reference materials are urgently needed to support safer-by-design tools evaluating whether changes to the surface chemistries, charges, and dimensions of functionalized cellulose materials impact their biological behaviour.
Regioselectively Carboxylated Cellulose Nanofibril Models from Dissolving Pulp: C6 via TEMPO Oxidation and C2,C3 via Periodate–Chlorite Oxidation, available for early access in Nanomaterials this week, reports our work led by our collaborators at UC Davis with our partners at Baylor University, in Texas, and the USDA Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, in Madison, WI. The materials created in this work are designed to span a range of different industrially relevant surface chemistries (i.e., C6 versus C2, C3 carboxylation), charges, widths and lengths and provide a comparable series of nanocellulose references and standards for environmental, health and safety assessments. This work is part of a larger project, funded by P3 Nano, to develop a safer-by-design toolbox for next-generation cellulose materials.