Invited Paper MS+PS+TF-ThM1
High-Performance Composites Based on Wood Cellulose Nanofibrils

Thursday, November 13, 2014, 8:00 am, Room 302

With increasing concerns for the climate and environment, it has been recognized globally that paradigm-shifting research is required to improve the performance of materials based on renewable resources. Attempts to develop very high performance natural cellulosic fibers based composite materials using intact cells from hemp, flax and cotton have failed mainly due to the inherent imperfections of the secondary cell walls of natural fiber cells. These issues have been recently addressed by replacing with cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs), which are three orders of magnitude smaller than the intact fiber cells. The extraction process of CNFs from renewable resource has been extensively investigated in the past decade. A critical challenge in the fabrication of high performance products based on CNFs is to tailor their surface structure and functionality in an efficient and environmentally friendly fashion, thus to accommodate a wider range of applications and sustainability requirements for the next generation of materials. In this talk, I will present our recent work on the fabrication of functional composite materials based on CNFs. In particular, several novel surface modification techniques of CNFs and their effects on nanostructure and material properties of CNFs based composites will be discussed.