Preparation Of Thermoplastic Cellulose Using Straw As Raw Material

Rice straw is one of the major farming wastes in China. A number of studies have been reported on the utilization of the straw waste. However, most of the works focused on making use of the straw cellulose for manufacturing synthetic plank or wood-plastic composite (WPC) materials, and little is achieved on using rice straw as an alternative to petroleum for chemical raw material resource. Therefore, the synthesis of environment-benign degradable thermoplastics using cellulose separated from rice straw, substituting petroleum-derived chemical raw materials, is of great significance in terms of coping with the petroleum crisis, protecting the environment and ecosystem, as well as promoting an sustainable agricultural development.In this paper, high boiling solvents (HBS) method was employed for high efficient separation of the lignin and cellulose from rice straw waste at a relatively low temperature of 160℃. Modified catalyst ABand mixed solvent of Glycerol and 1,4-Butanediol was also used in the experiment.The results of the experiment show that the method used in this paper is of much more efficiency and higher yield according to the method reported.And the separated lignin and cellulose is less degraded,beneficial for the further use.The benzylating modification of the resulting HBS cellulose was performed using benzyl chloride as the benzylation reagent and toluene as the diluent.The benzylation product was investigated through IR, XRD and DSC. The results show that the chemicalstructure of the cellulose has been changed, almost all of the–OH has been benzylized and the cellulose was of decrystallization,a glass transition temperature of 148.48°C has occurred, indicating that the benzylation cellulose has been transformed into a thermoplastic material.