7.Keynote – Functional polyelectrolyte gels

Polyelectrolytes are basic components of living systems and crucial elements for developing stimuli-responsive and reconfigurable materials. In this lecture, polyelectrolytes designed to organize into architectures with biomimetic functions including catalytic membranes, responsive hydrogels, and ion-conducting membranes will be described with emphasis on their response to the ionic spatial distributions and dynamics.

7.Invited – Quantitative Biomimetics of Fibrous Nanocomposites or How to Befriend Structural Stochasticity

Biomimetic nanocomposites from cellulose and other nanofibers are attractive as resource-conscious alternative to many current load bearing, charge transporting, ion-selective, and optically-active materials. These composites contain a superposition of order and disorder, which makes them difficult to design optimize. Similar pairing or non-randomness and stochasticity is also present in high-performance load-bearing, mass-transporting, ion-selective, and optically-active […]

7.5 Preparation of defectless TEMPO-oxidized nanocellulose dispersions

Ensuring the quality of cellulose nanofibers (CNFs), particularly in terms of dispersibility and defect density, is crucial for fully utilizing their potential. While CNF dispersibility can now be adjusted by selecting appropriate raw material species or employing specific chemical pretreatments, controlling defects remains a challenge. In our previous study, we found that the dent defects […]

7.4 Shear-induced orientational order provides optimum individualization during ultrasonication of cellulose nanocrystal

While ultrasonication is a widely used standard method to disperse nanoparticles across scientific and technological communities, in academia and industry, a parameter that has received surprisingly little attention is the particle mass fraction $W_s$ at which sonication takes place. For anisometric nanoparticles like nanorods, nanoplatelets and nanotubes, its importance goes far beyond viscosity tuning, since […]

7.9 Glucose/glucuronate co-polysaccharides stripped off in mechanical shearng of oxidized cell wall cellulose

The molecular byproduct inevitably contained in oxidized cellulose nanofibers (CNFs)/water dispersions was identified in this study to amorphous and water-soluble oxidized cellulose molecules with the major skeleton of glucose/glucuronate alternating co-polysaccharides. These oxidized molecules also possessed short segments of polyglucuronate, and the molar ratio of major glucose/glucuronate skeleton to the polyglucuronate segment by the number […]

7.6 Synergistic Effects of Cellulose Nanofibrils and Lignin Nanoparticles in Sustainable Pickering Emulsions and Foams

Cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) and lignin nanoparticles (LNPs) have emerged as sustainable emulsifiers for Pickering emulsions due to their favorable properties like renewability, low toxicity, amphiphilicity and biocompatibility. In most studies they have been used separately but their combination offers unique advantages not achievable with only one of the components. The spherical and amphiphilic LNPs assemble […]

7.1 Dissociation behavior of phosphorylated cellulose nanocrystals in low ionic strength environments

When determining the surface charge and pKa values of colloidal particles, the most popular existing methods are conductometric and potentiometric titration. However, the dissociation of the closely packed charged species on a colloidal particle is suppressed due to a phenomenon called counterion condensation which directly influences the titration curves. The phenomenon has been mathematically described […]

7.11 Physicochemical properties of cellulose nanocrystal-reinforced hydroxypropyl cellulose hydrogels

This study investigates the physicochemical properties of cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) -reinforced hydroxypropyl cellulose (HPC) hydrogels. HPC is a cellulose-derived, thermo-responsive polymer that forms physically cross-linked hydrogels near body temperature, while CNCs are rigid, rod-like nanocellulose particles that serve as effective mechanical reinforcements. The viscoelastic properties of the hydrogels as a function of temperature were characterized […]