Quantifying reinforcing efficiency of nanocellulose fibres

• Cellulose nanofibres are found in all plants and have the potential to provide a sustainable biobased material source. These nanofibres can be used for reinforcing polymers and thus as structural materials. Very promising results have been reported for different nanocomposites but to compete with existing materials, it is important to understand what progress has been made towards structural materials using nanocellulose. To do this the reinforcing efficiency of the stiffness and strength of nanocellulose in different nanocomposites has been calculated for a number of reported nanocellulose fibre based composites. For the stiffness this is done by back-calculating a reinforcing efficiency factor from a Halpin-Tsai model and laminate theory. For the strength efficiency, two models are used: a classic short fibre composite model and a network model. The results show that orientation is key to the stiffness efficiency, as shown by the high efficiency of aligned natural fibres. The stiffness efficiency is, as expected, high in soft matrices but in stiff matrices, the network effect of the nanofibres is possibility limiting their reinforcing potential. The strength efficiency results show that in all the nanocomposites evaluated the network model is closer to predicting strength than the short fibre composite model. The correlation between the network strength and the composite strength suggest that much of the stress transfer is from fibre to fibre and strong nanocomposites depend heavily on having a strong network. Also noted is that in composite processing a good impregnation of the nanofibers is also seen as an important factor in the efficiency of both strength and stiffness.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Industriell bioteknik -- Biomaterial (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Industrial Biotechnology -- Bio Materials (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Trä och bionanokompositer

Wood and Bionanocomposites

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)