A comparative study of methods for porosity determination of cellulose based porous materials
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
A comparative study of methods for porosity determination of cellulose based porous materials Muhammad R. Hossen . Matthew W. Talbot . Raymond Kennard . Douglas W. Bousfield . Michael D. Mason
Received: 11 March 2020 / Accepted: 21 May 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Cellulose based foams and aerogels are gaining interest as an alternative to petroleum derived materials. The characterization of the internal void fraction, or porosity, of these materials is an essential parameter in assessing their potential for practical applications. The physical nature of these materials includes a web-like pore morphology, high compressibility, and significant roughness of both the internal and external surfaces. These issues cause the determination of porosity using standard methods to be unreliable. In this study, low density cellulose nanofibrils foams were generated, and pore volume and pore size results were compared using mercury porosimetry, Barrett–Joyner–Halenda (BJH) gas sorption, image analysis, and geometric methods. A new Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-020-03257-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. M. R. Hossen M. D. Mason (&) Department of Chemistry, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. W. Talbot R. Kennard D. W. Bousfield M. D. Mason Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, USA R. Kennard Department of Chemistry, Husson University, Bangor, ME 04401, USA
simple silicone oil saturation-based method to measure the porosity of these materials was also presented. Utilizing this method, the porosity of cellulose based foams and aerogels have been determined with improved accuracy compared to the existing standard methods. Keywords Cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) Porosity Mercury porosimetry (MP) Fluid saturation Silicone oil
Introduction Foams and aerogels with high porosity, low-density, and large specific surface areas are widely used for a broad range of applications such as packaging materials, fluid absorbents, insulation, and in automotive body parts as well as in energy and biomedical applications (Bureiko et al. 2015; Lavoine and Bergstro¨m 2017; Garcı´a-Gonza´lez et al. 2019). However, commercially available foams and aerogels are mostly composed of non-biodegradable petroleumbased polymers such as polyurethane, polyethylene and polystyrene. These materials are difficult to recycle because of their low density results in high transportation costs. In addition, if they end up in the environment or landfills, they will last hundreds of years (Singh et al. 2017; Wu et al. 2019). Due to these
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drawbacks, there is a strong desire to produce these materials from biodegradable and sustainable biopolymers. Among currently available biopolymers, cellulose is the most abundant sustainable polymer on the earth (Wang et al
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