Milling in Seconds Accelerates Acetylation of Cellulose in Hours

Bungo Ochiai; Toshiya Watanabe; Chikako Hanzawa; Koki Akiyama; Yoshimasa Matsumura; Ryoichiro Shimura; Tomonori Koda; Akihiro Nishioka

doi:10.1021/acsomega.9b02422

Milling in Seconds Accelerates Acetylation of Cellulose in Hours

ACS Omega. 2019 Oct 9;4(17):17542-17546. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.9b02422. eCollection 2019 Oct 22.

Authors

Bungo Ochiai¹, Toshiya Watanabe¹, Chikako Hanzawa¹, Koki Akiyama¹, Yoshimasa Matsumura¹, Ryoichiro Shimura¹, Tomonori Koda¹, Akihiro Nishioka¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Engineering and Department of Organic Materials Science, Graduate School of Organic Materials Science, Yamagata University, 4-3-16, Jonan, Yonezawa, Yamagata 992-8510, Japan.

Abstract

A new sustainable synthetic method for cellulose acetate was developed by a combination of I₂-catalyzed solid-liquid acetylation of cellulose and a milling process reducing the crystallinity of cellulose within a few seconds. Milled low-crystalline cellulose was acetylated faster than the original cellulose with higher crystallinity. The plausible factors of acceleration were the conversion of the hydroxy group in hydrogen bonds into reactive ones and the efficient formation of the catalytic species I⁺ by the enhanced formation of I₃ ^- assisted by the amorphous domain of the milled cellulose, while the morphological and structural changes were ignorable.