Open Access

ARTICLE

Flexible Nanopaper Composed of Wood-Derived Nanofibrillated Cellulose and Graphene Building Blocks

Qing Li¹, Ming Dai¹, Xueren Qian¹, Tian Liu¹, Zhenbo Liu¹, Yu Liu¹, Ming Chen¹, Wang He¹, Suqing Zeng¹, Yu Meng¹, Chenchen Dai¹, Jing Shen¹, Yingtao Liu¹, Wenshuai Chen¹, Wenbo Liu^1,*, Ping Lu^2,*

1 College of Material Science and Engineering, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, 150040, China
2 Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, 08028, USA

* Corresponding Authors: Wenbo Liu. Email: ; Ping Lu. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Nanocellulose and Nanocellulose-Derived Functional Materials)

Journal of Renewable Materials 2021, 9(3), 451-461. https://doi.org/10.32604/jrm.2021.011655

Received 22 May 2020; Accepted 11 August 2020; Issue published 14 January 2021

Abstract

Nanopaper has attracted considerable interest in the fields of films and paper research. However, the challenge of integrating the many advantages of nanopaper still remains. Herein, we developed a facile strategy to fabricate multifunctional nanocomposite paper (NGCP) composed of wood-derived nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) and graphene as building blocks. NFC suspension was consisted of long and entangled NFCs (10–30 nm in width) and their aggregates. Before NGCP formation, NFC was chemically modified with a silane coupling agent to ensure that it could interact strongly with graphene in NGCP. The resulting NGCP samples were flexible and could be bent repeatedly without any structural damage. Within the NGCP samples, the high aspect ratio of NFC made a major contribution to its high mechanical strength, whereas the sheet-like graphene endowed the NGCP with electrical resistance and electrochemical activity. The mechanical strength of the NGCP samples decreased as their graphene content increased. However, the electrical resistance and electrochemical activity of the NGCP samples both rose with increasing content of graphene. The NGCPs still kept advantageous mechanical properties even at high temperatures around 300°C because of the high thermal stability of NFCs and their strong entangled web-like structures. In view of its sustainable building blocks and multifunctional characteristics, the NGCP developed in this work is promising as low-cost and high-performance nanopaper.

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