Strong biodegradable cellulose materials with improved crystallinity via hydrogen bonding tailoring strategy for UV blocking and antioxidant activity

Abstract It has been a huge challenge to obtain simultaneously excellent mechanical strength and desirable multifunctionality from the cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) based food packing materials. In this work, we demonstrated a hydrogen bonding tailoring strategy that can produce CNC/lignin films with UV blocking and antioxidant activity, while bypassing the loss of mechanical strength. Using a hyperbranched polyester, lignin was first functionalized to increase the amount of hydroxyl groups, thereby increasing the intermolecular interactions. By assembling the polyester modified lignin (H-lignin) into CNC matrix, the hydrogen bonding crosslinks between the H-lignin and CNC chains were successfully promoted, resulting in the CNC composites with the significantly improved mechanical strength, UV blocking and antioxidant activity. The phenolic structure and the hydrogen donation of H-lignin also endowed the resulting CNC composites with excellent UV blocking and antioxidant activity. The experimental results indicated that the H-lignin could bring about 34% and 63% increase in tensile strength and Young's modulus, respectively, higher than the reported ones. The CNC-based composites showed better thermal stability and improved crystallinity property. The H-lignin provides a new insight into the multifunctional exploration of CNC-based composite. This work opens a new avenue for the next generation's biodegradable food packing materials from cellulose-sourced composites.