(707b) Regenerated Cellulose Films Prepared From Sugarcane Bagasse in Room Temperature Ionic Liquid

Fossil based fuels, power, and products are critical to the current economy of the World. Continued massive consumption of fossil hydrocarbon reserves presents serious energy security and environmental quality issues for the World. Scientific and engineering breakthroughs currently made suggest the potential for transferring much of the current reliance on fossil hydrocarbons to bio-based fuels, power, and products that will do much to improve energy security, rural economic development, and environmental quality.

Cellulose is probably the most abundant biopolymer in the world. It is produced from regenerated resources and is a biodegradable polymer so that it will be one of the main chemical bio-based resources of the future. Its characterization is of particular interest to the textile, pulp, paper, and cellulose derivative industries. However due to the stiff molecule and close chain packing via numerous inter- and intra-molecular hydrogen bonds in cellulose, it is difficult to dissolve cellulose without chemical modification or derivatization. Up to now, Researchers have mainly used the viscose process which had lasted for 100 years and NMMO process which ranks among the new environmentally friendly processes to make regenerated cellulose. However, the viscose route brings about considerable pollution of air, watercourses, land, and current health fears over carbon disulphide air pollution. While, despite the industrialization of NMMO solvent system, it has some disadvantages associated with its use, such as the requirement for high temperature to dissolve, activation needed before dissolution, the degradation of cellulose, the side reaction of the solvent itself without an antioxidant, and its high cost as well. Therefore the search for excellent and environment friendly solvents for cellulose continues.

Recently, Room temperature ionic liquids have been used to dissolve native cellulose. ILs is advangeous over other solvents due to the following properties: (1) it is a non-derivatizing solvent that can dissolve cellulose with a degree of polymerization (DP) as high as 650 rapidly without any pretreatment (2) it is an environmentally green solvents for a broad range of chemical and industrial process (3) it can be recycled easily in many cases. Already, 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride (BmimCl) and 1-allyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride (AmimCl) have been reported to be suitable solvents for cellulose.

However, it should be noted that, the main source of cellulose for application is still cotton and dissolving pulp with high purity by far. This fact makes the raw materials expensive to obtain; on the other hand, the agriculture residue which contains more than 30% cellulose are particularly attractive because of their relatively low cost and plentiful supply. Therefore, the willingness to develop new biomass-based materials, especially the agriculture waste, is very interesting and promising.

In particular, Sugarcane bagasse (SB) as an abundant agricultural lignocellulosic byproduct is a fibrous residue of cane stalks left over after the crushing and extraction of the juice from the sugarcane. Annually, about 54 million dry tonnes of bagasse which contains approximately 50% cellulose is produced throughout the world. But most of this residue is burned, thereby losing energy and causing serious pollution to air, Therefore, this raw material possesses a high economic and environmental potential. So, in the present paper, we have focused on cellulose obtained from agricultural wastes?? SB, which is such a fast growing and cheap sources.

In the present article, we use SB to prepare cellulose, then dissolve and regenerated the sugarcane bagasse cellulose (SBC) in AmimCl solution to obtain regenerated sugarcane bagasse cellulose (RSBC) films.Results showed that the tensile strength of RSBC films prepared in AmimCl can reach as high as 133 Mpa, the value of which is even a bit higher than the RC film prepared from wood pulp at the same condition ( 128Mpa).

FTIR spectroscopy shows that AmimCl is direct solvent for cellulose; The X-ray results indicate that the change of cellulose I into cellulose II occurred during the dissolution and regeneration process; SEM micrographs of RSBC indicated that after regeneration from AmimCl, the morphology of the dry material is fused into a relatively homogeneous macrostructure from the interior to the surface, displaying a dense texture.

Above all, this study provides a technically feasible and environmentally acceptable method to prepare regenerated cellulose film using relatively cheap sugarcane bagasse as cellulose resources.