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Updated: Jan 31, 2026

Towards Biomimicking Wood: Fabricated Free-standing Films of Nanocellulose, Lignin, and a Synthetic Polycation
Published on: June 17, 2014
Effect of nanocellulose fiber hornification on water fraction characteristics and hydroxyl accessibility during
Qijun Ding1, Jinsong Zeng2, Bin Wang2
1State Key Laboratory of Pulp and Paper Engineering, Plant Micro/Nano Fiber Research Center, School of Light Industry and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 516640, China.
Abstract:
Hornification are usually occurred in cellulosic fibers and even in nanocellulose fibrils during dehydration process but their mesoscopic structural changes is not fully understood. Here we investigated the structural features of cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) and cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) with different solid content. In order to avoid the effect of drying, liquid AFM mode was carried out in this work. The different water contents of nanocellulose were quantified by Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC). We showed evidence of extreme growth in radial direction in the redispersed nanocelluloses, analyzed by statistics of contours from microscopy images. The amount of free water, freezing bound water, and non-freezing bound water decreased gradually during water evaporation and were completely removed in sequence. In addition, the hydroxyl accessibility of both redispersed CNCs and CNF were reduced by 83.33% and 81.96% via evaluating the uptake of fluorescent dyes.
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