Debbie

There is a growing trend in nanotechnology to revive the forest industry and develop value-added products from wood-derived materials. As a newly discovered byproduct of forestry industry, Cellulose Nanocrystals (CNC) extracted from acid hydrolysis of wood fibers is regarded as world's latest wonder material.

Cellulose Nanocrystals Vs Carbon Nanotube

Compared with another famous nanomaterial-Carbon nanotube (See table below), CNC shares similar attractive physical properties while being much more attractive in more aspects like cost, environmental friendliness, surface reactivity etc. The only thing carbon nanotube has while CNC doesn't is conductivity.

Introducing Conductivity to CNCs

My work focuses on making hybrid materials of conductive CNC by incorporating intrinsically conductive polymers (ICPs). The hybrid composite not only inherit the physical properties of the CNC substrate (e.g. mechanical strength, specific surface area etc.) but also retain the attractive electrical properties of ICPs. At the same time, it resolve the inherent problems of ICPs including low solubility, intractable phase, poor mechanical property which make it difficult to process into useful articles on its own.

Applicaions for Conductive CNC hybrid material

ICPs have successfully demonstrated their potential being used in a wide variety of applications before like sensors, anti-static/EMI shielding paints, OLED, supercapcitors, etc. due to their superior physical and chemical properties. This opens endless opportunities for the hybrid material of CNC/ICP and some of them are listed below. It is expected to be a rather promising nanocomposite and can be easily adapted to industrial manufacturing.

Publication:

Xinyun Wu, K. C. Tam and Richard Berry, "Surface Modified Nanocrystalline Cellulose and Uses Thereof", US patent 55596984-16USPR

Xinyun Wu, Richard D. Oleschuk and Natalie M. Cann, Analyst (cover page), 2012, 137, 4150-4161

Wu, X., etc and Tam, K.C. "Soft Nanomaterials: Synthesis, properties and applications (Current status and future Book chapter in "Polysaccharide Nanocrystals", 2013, World Scientific publications, in preparation.