synopsisAn examination of powder x-ray diff ractograms of native and hydrolyzed cellulosic materials obtained from widely different sources revealed the presence of materials having a higher degree of molecular order than ramie hydrolyzate, the conventional crystalline standard for cellulose. With the use of these materials as new crystalline standards, a critical reappraisal has been made of the validity of the application of the two-phase (i.e., fringed-micelle) hypothesis to the fine structure of cotton and related cellulosic materials. It is concluded that the lattice structure of cotton and related celluloses of plant or bacterial origin is liquid-like or paracrystalline.

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SynopsisIt has been shown that the breaking load histograms of raw, slack-mercerized, and mercerizedstretched cottons can be represented by @-distributions. The breaking load distribution is positively skewed for raw cotton. The influence of slack mercerization is to make the distributions symmetric and to reduce the variability of the breaking load by the elimination of weak links. The mode of the distribution shifts toward higher breaking load upon mercerization, and this shift increases with the extent of applied stretch. For various raw and mercerized cottons, the effect of increasing the gauge length is to reduce the mean, mode, and variability of the breaking load and to make the distributions less and less asymmetric. The application of stretch to swollen fibers influences the load distribution on the side of higher load and renders the distribution asymmetric.