Time-Domain NMR Techniques in Cellulose Structure Analysis

The role of cellulose in various applications is remarkably going up in recent decades as it is a renewable material for wide areas of applications that can be delivered in huge quantities. This drives permanently growing interest to development of sensors for processing industry, that can give fast and reliable information about physicochemical structure of cellulosic materials. In this framework, Time-Domain NMR with its capability to be miniaturized may become very attractive to measure such structural parameters as crystallinity, domain sizes, and sorption properties. This contribution is aimed to summarize existing NMR relaxometric methods and update them with the techniques of signal processing and pulse sequences like Magic Sandwich Echo or multiple quantum transitions, that are well established for synthetic polymers, but still have not been extensively used for polysaccharides. Here, we also demonstrate our own results of cellulose study trying to contribute to the promotion of Time-Domain NMR applicability to biopolymers.