A new understanding concerning the influence of structural changes on the thermal behavior of cellulose

A study has been made on an attempt to further expand the current knowledge in melt processing of cellulose. The basic idea is that a few zinc compounds may remain in the regenerated cellulose by formation of a zinc-cellulose complex and hydrolysis reaction when ZnCl2 molten hydrates are used as a solvent for cellulose. The chance is that zinc compounds may act as isolation agents to destroy the hydrogen bonding and reduce the crystallinity of cellulose. Interesting results revealed that the raw cellulose and regenerated celluloses in our work showed different structures and other, but specific, thermal behavior, admitting that the melting of cellulose was not detected. The results are preliminary but demonstrate that simply destroying the hydrogen bonding and reducing the crystallinity will promote the dehydration of cellulose at a lower temperature, since the activity of the cellulose hydroxyls would be improved unexpectedly in that condition. It is expected that this study will stimulate some new ideas to make some progress in the melt processing of this material.