Cellulose Nanocomposite Hydrogels: From Formulation to Material Properties

Svetlana Butylina; Shiyu Geng; Katri Laatikainen; Kristiina Oksman

doi:10.3389/fchem.2020.00655

Cellulose Nanocomposite Hydrogels: From Formulation to Material Properties

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

Authors

Svetlana Butylina^{1

2}, Shiyu Geng¹, Katri Laatikainen², Kristiina Oksman^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Division of Material Science, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden.
² Laboratory of Computational and Process Engineering, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, Lappeenranta, Finland.
³ Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE), University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.

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.