Accelerated Fabrication of Fiber-Welded Mesoporous Cotton Composites

Natural fiber-welded (NFW) biopolymer composites are rapidly garnering industrial and commercial attention in the textile sector, and a recent disclosure demonstrating the production of mesoporous NFW materials suggests a bright future as sorbents, filters, and nanoparticle scaffolds. A significant roadblock in the mass production of mesoporous NFW composites for research and development is their lengthy preparation time: 24 h of water rinses to remove the ionic liquid (IL) serving as a welding medium and then 72 h of solvent exchanges (polar to nonpolar), followed by oven drying to attain a mesoporous composite. In this work, the rinsing procedure is systematically truncated using the solution conductivity as a yardstick to monitor IL removal. The traditional water immersion rinses are replaced by a flow-through system (i.e., infinite dilution) using a peristaltic pump, reducing the required water rinse time for the maximum removal of IL to 30 min. This procedure also allows for easy in-line monitoring of solution conductivity and reclamation of an expensive welding solvent. Further, the organic solvent exchange is minimized to 10 min per solvent (from 24 h), resulting in a total combined rinse time of 1 h. This process acceleration reduces the overall solvent exposure time from 96 to 1 h, an almost 99% temporal improvement.