Water Hyacinth: A Sustainable Lignin-Poor Cellulose Source for the Production of Cellulose Nanofibers

Abstract

The extraction of cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) from a lignocellulosic source containing less lignin would be an effective way to avoid repetitious and energy-consuming chemical treatments. In the present study, we used water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes)a fast-growing, rapidly reproducing, sustainable, and inexpensive raw material with a low lignin content (4.1%)to successfully prepare CNFs with diameters of 10–30 nm and lengths of several μm. We used three different chemical approaches: chemical-free, alkaline, and combined sodium chlorite and alkaline treatments. The results indicate that the alkaline treatment alone was sufficient to eliminate most of the lignin and hemicellulose from water hyacinth, providing CNFs with morphological, crystallinity, and thermal characteristics similar to those of CNFs prepared using combined sodium chlorite and alkaline treatment. Also, mechanical properties and thermal expansion of the nanopapers prepared from these chemically treated CNFs were comparable. Water hyacinth has potential as a sustainable cellulose source for the large-scale production of CNFs for advanced applications in tropical and subtropical countries in comparison with wood or other lignocellulosic sources due to a lower requirement for chemical treatments. Moreover, water hyacinth has other positive aspects such as its rapid breeding rate, availability, and economical price.

A process for deriving high quality cellulose nanofibrils from water hyacinth invasive species

“…A similar trend has been reported for cellulose crystallinity processed using various mechanical processes (e.g. grinding and high intensity sonication) (Tanpichai et al 2019). However, the figure also indicates that as the number of passes increased, the crystallinity index was slightly decreased (55% for 5 pass sample).…”

“…Recently, WH have come under investigation as an alternative source for extracting cellulose/nanocellulose (Thiripura Sundari and Ramesh 2012;Suryadi et al 2017;Asrofi et al 2018;Juárez-Luna et al 2019;Tanpichai et al 2019). Most of these studies on cellulose extraction from WH make use of high amounts of alkali at elevated temperatures, up to 90°C (Thiripura Sundari and Ramesh 2012;Suryadi et al 2017).…”

Lignocellulosic Fibers from Renewable Resources Using Green Chemistry for a Circular Economy

“…[ 38 ] The peaks at 1281, 1370, and 1427 cm −1 may be due to aromatic esters, ether, and phenol compounds. [ 39 ] The peak corresponding to 1730 cm −1 is from unconjugated CO stretching which is due to vibration of aliphatic carboxylic acids and ketones of hemicellulose or lignin groups and that near 1650 cm −1 is due to conjugated carbonyl found in hemicellulose and lignin groups. [ 40 ] Moreover, CH symmetric and asymmetric stretching bands appeared at 2900 cm −1 and hydrogen bonded stretching bands of OH groups at 3400 cm −1 are characteristics peaks of hydroxyl groups of cellulose.…”

“…[ 40 ] Moreover, CH symmetric and asymmetric stretching bands appeared at 2900 cm −1 and hydrogen bonded stretching bands of OH groups at 3400 cm −1 are characteristics peaks of hydroxyl groups of cellulose. [ 39 ] All the fibers, including the hemp hurds, had similar FTIR spectra since they had similar lignocellulosic compositions as shown in Table 1 and none of the pulping resulted in significant change in the chemical structure of the fibers.…”

Recent development of plant-derived nanocellulose in polymer nanocomposite foams and multifunctional applications: A mini-review

“…Nanocellulose extracted from plants has two generic forms: cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) and cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), as shown in Figure 1. CNFs, sometimes called nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC), with widths of less than 50 nm and lengths up to several µm, are disintegrated from a dilute pulp suspension using mechanical treatment with high shear forces such as grinding, homogenizing, refining and microfluidizing [7,[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. It should be noted that these mechanical approaches consume large amounts of energy owing to repetitious mechanical treatment cycles.…”