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 […]
7.3 Long-ranged double-layer forces at high ionic strengths, with modified Restricted Primitive Models
We have explored a hypothesis on a possible origin for the peculiar long-ranged interactions that the groups of Israelachvili and Perkin have found, using the Surface Force Apparatus (SFA), in concentrated salt solutions and ionic liquid mixtures[1,2]. We have specifically focused on aqueous salt solutions, although the concept can in principle be applied to other […]
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 […]
7.10 Uniformity in Cross-Sectional Dimensions and Crystallinity of Diverse Plant Cellulose Microfibrils
Plant cell walls are composed of skeletal cellulose and a filling matrix of hemicelluloses and lignin. Cellulose has slender crystallite units referred to as microfibrils or elementary fibrils, and these crystallites form a dense network skeleton in the cell walls. In this study, we assessed the morphology and crystallinity of individually dispersed microfibrils isolated from […]
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 […]