Manufacturing and Characterization of Cellulose Nanofibers

Sammanfattning: The usage of wood has been a dominant driving force during the evolution of the human species. It allowed us to cook food, build tools, put roofs over our head and explore the world. The fibers making up the tree has been the most important way to store and transmit knowledge in the form of paper for centuries. It may not be considered as the most interesting or hi-tech of fields, although, nothing could be further from the truth. One of society's most significant issue is how to live sustainably, which is coincidentally exactly what trees can solve. We can live in tall buildings made from wood, locking up vast amounts of carbon dioxide - we can replace many of the plastics we use today with sustainable alternative from the components making up the tree - we could even make clothes from our trees and stop being reliant on the untenable cotton production - only our imagination is holding us back from what can be made from trees.Cellulose is the structural component in trees, the molecule arranges itself in a complex hierarchical structure that forms the wood-cells, or fibers. Breaking down this hierarchical structure down to its smallest structural units leaves us with tiny fibers, no longer than a few micrometers and with a width of merely four nanometers. These are cellulose nanofibers, and this work has aimed to understand how and what it takes to liberate these fine fibers from the larger fiber that they make up. Two main pathways exist to liberate the nanofibers, either chemically by introducing negatively charged groups on the surface of the cellulose, making the fibrils repel each other, or mechanically, simply by intense processing of the fibers. However, these processes are associated with certain flaws in that (i) vast amount of energy is required unless the fibers are pretreated, (ii) disintegration is performed in instruments that do not scale well, (iii) disintegration is carried out at a low concentration of fibers, typically below 5%. Additionally, what comes out of a process is difficult to characterize in terms of quality due to an inherent inhomogeneity and the small size of the nanofibers.These issues in combination with a greater understanding of the processes are the foundation of this thesis.Decreased energy consumption and scalability was explored via the steam explosion concept Nanopulp. In order to avoid issues associated with the low concentration, a method was developed for drying cellulose nanofibers to a paste without causing hornification using glycerol. A variety of cellulose nanofibers from different sources were prepared and characterization techniques were compared and expanded upon, including the development of a method for better describing the surface area of cellulose nanofibers. Finally, an environmentally friendly composite was made using cheap and available resources in combination with cellulose nanofibers.