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. 2020 Sep 11:8:655.
doi: 10.3389/fchem.2020.00655. eCollection 2020.

Cellulose Nanocomposite Hydrogels: From Formulation to Material Properties

Svetlana Butylina  1   2 , Shiyu Geng  1 , Katri Laatikainen  2 , Kristiina Oksman  1   3
Affiliations
Free PMC article

Cellulose Nanocomposite Hydrogels: From Formulation to Material Properties

Svetlana Butylina et al. Front Chem. .
Free PMC article

Abstract

Poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) hydrogels produced using the freeze-thaw method have attracted attention for a long time since their first preparation in 1975. Due to the importance of polymer intrinsic features and the advantages associated with them, they are very suitable for biomedical applications such as tissue engineering and drug delivery systems. On the other hand, there is an increasing interest in the use of biobased additives such as cellulose nanocrystals, CNC. This study focused on composite hydrogels which were produced by using different concentrations of PVA (5 and 10%) and CNC (1 and 10 wt.%), also, pure PVA hydrogels were used as references. The main goal was to determine the impact of both components on mechanical, thermal, and water absorption properties of composite hydrogels as well as on morphology and initial water content. It was found that PVA had a dominating effect on all hydrogels. The effect of the CNC addition was both concentration-dependent and case-dependent. As a general trend, addition of CNC decreased the water content of the prepared hydrogels, decreased the crystallinity of the PVA, and increased the hydrogels compression modulus and strength to some extent. The performance of composite hydrogels in a cyclic compression test was studied; the hydrogel with low PVA (5) and high CNC (10) content showed totally reversible behavior after 10 cycles.

Keywords: cellulose nanocrystals; compression; load-unload experiments; poly(vinyl alcohol); thermograms; water absorption.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
AFM image of diluted CNC sample (A) together with height (B) and length (C) distributions.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Water absorption by reference and composite hydrogels: (A) P5C(0−10) and (B) P10C(0−10).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Heating (A,B) and cooling (C,D) thermograms for the reference and composite hydrogels.
Figure 4
Figure 4
ATR-IR spectra of the reference and composite hydrogels: (A) P5C(0−10) and (B) P10C(0−10).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Hysteresis cycles of repeating compression experiments for P5C10 and P10C10 composite hydrogels.
Figure 6
Figure 6
(A) Modulus measured at strain level 30% as a function of the number of compression cycles for the P5C10 composite (blue bars) and P10C10 composite (white bars), and (B) change in thickness of composites.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Scanning electron micrographs of composite hydrogels: (A,C) P5C10 and (B,D) P10C10.
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