Ice-Templated Porous Nanocellulose-Based Materials: Current Progress and Opportunities for Materials Engineering

Abstract

Nanocelluloses (cellulose nanocrystals, CNCs, or cellulose nanofibrils, CNFs) are the elementary reinforcing constituents of plant cell walls. Because of their pronounced slenderness and outstanding intrinsic mechanical properties, nanocelluloses constitute promising building blocks for the design of future biobased high-performance materials such as nanocomposites, dense and transparent films, continuous filaments, and aerogels and foams. The research interest in nanocellulose-based aerogels and foams is recent but growing rapidly. These materials have great potential in many engineering fields, including construction, transportation, energy, and biomedical sectors. Among the various processing routes used to obtain these materials, ice-templating is one of the most regarded, owing to its simplicity and versatility and the wide variety of porous materials that this technique can provide. The focus of this review is to discuss the current state of the art and understanding of ice-templated porous nanocellulose-based materials. We provide a review of the main forming processes that use the principle of ice-templating to produce porous nanocellulose-based materials and discuss the effect of processing conditions and suspension formulation on the resulting microstructures of the materials.