Rheological fingerprinting and applications of cellulose nanocrystal based composites: A review

Cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) are unique renewable nanomaterials promise wide applicability owing to their non-toxicity, chirality and self-assembly properties. CNC also serve as rheological modifiers, improving the properties such as storage modulus and complex viscosity. Tuning the rheological proper-ties of CNC based composites is essential for industrial, environmental and biological activity that involves rapid deformations. Traditional small amplitude oscillatory shear (SAOS) methods are not suffi-cient to quantify the complete rheological behaviour of the system. Large amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) analysis gives a new insight to investigate and quantify the nonlinear viscoelastic behaviour of the system. This review provides insight into the rheological fingerprinting of CNC-based composites using linear and nonlinear rheological aspects. We present a systematic, in-depth and comprehensive study on the rheology of CNC-based composites with a major focus on the factors affecting the rheolog-ical properties of CNC dispersions and their composites. We discuss a few applications in the fields of 3D printing, coating industries and aerogels where tuning the rheological properties of CNC are crucial. We identify the challenges involved to tune the rheological properties of the commonly studied composites and presented future directions for CNC-based composites.& COPY; 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.