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Palasingh, C; Strom, A; Amer, H; Nypelo, T.
(2021): Oxidized xylan additive for nanocellulose films-A swelling modifier
INT J BIOL MACROMOL. 2021; 180: 753-759. FullText FullText_BOKU

Abstract:: Polymeric wood hemicelluloses are depicted to join cellulose, starch and chitosan as key polysaccharides for sus-tainable materials engineering. However, the approaches to incorporate hemicelluloses in emerging bio-based products are challenged by lack of specific benefit, other than the biomass-origin, although their utilization would contribute to sustainable material use since they currently are a side stream that is not valorized. Here we demonstrate wood-xylans as swelling modifiers for neutral and charged nanocellulose films that have already entered the sustainable packaging applications, however, suffer from humidity sensitivity. The oxidative modifi-cation is used to modulate the water-solubility of xylan and hence enable adsorption in an aqueous environment. A high molecular weight grade, hence less water-soluble, adsorbed preferentially on the neutral surface while the adsorbed amount on a negatively charged surface was independent of the molecular weight, and hence, solubil-ity. The adsorption of the oxidized xylans on a neutral cellulose surface resulted in an increase in the amount of water in the film while on the negatively charged cellulose the total amount of water decreased. The finding of synergy of two hygroscopic materials to decrease swelling in hydrophilic bio-polymer films demonstrates the ox-idized macromolecule xylan as structurally functional component in emerging cellulose products. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Authors BOKU Wien:: Amer Hassan
Find related publications in this database (Keywords): Wood components; Renewable materials; Sustainable engineering