Cellulose nanofibre preparation and post-treatment

Cellulose nanofibre is a long filament with a typically lateral dimension less than 100 nm. Various manufacturing methods have been reported, among which the ball milling is one of the topdown techniques to produce highly crystalline cellulose nanofibre from softwood pulp. Our previous studies show that the morphologies and properties of cellulose nanofibre are influenced by ball milling conditions. In this paper, we investigate on the effects of the after-treatments i.e., purification, drying process and sample storage. The purification process improves the purity of the sample. Drying conditions influence the cellulose nanofibre morphologies significantly. While the gel-like stored cellulose nanofibre can be easily resuspended homogenously. The impacts of after-treatments on preparation of cellulose nanofibre from softwood pulp are discussed and the ball milling is demonstrated to be an effective one-step process to produce nanofibre under ambient conditions in this work.