Eco-Friendly Extraction and Characterization of Cellulose from Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunches

By M. Nazir, Bambang A. Wahjoedi, A. W. Yussof, M. A. Abdullah. 2013

248 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cellulosic fibers in Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunches (OPEFB) are tightly packed with lignin, hemicelluloses, small depositions of wax, and inorganic elements. In the present work, eco-friendly reagents with low concentrations of 20% (v/v) formic acid and 10% (v/v) of 30% hydrogen peroxide were employed at 85 oC for the extraction of cellulose from OPEFB. The yield of 64% (w/w) achieved was among the highest ever reported. Based on the XRD, the alpha-cellulose content was 93.7% with a high crystallinity of 69.9%. The average diameter was 13.5 μm with structural evidence of separated fibrils as investigated by FESEM. The TEM analysis suggested that the material was crystalline and its geometry was a monoclinic structure. The FTIR spectral peaks representing wax and hemicelluloses at 1735 cm-1 and 1375 cm-1, respectively, and lignin at 1248 cm-1 and 1037 cm-1, were not observed in the extracted OPEFB-cellulose spectra. Based on the TGA results, thermal stability at 325 °C with a single degradation curve suggests the purity of OPEFB-cellulose.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f396fae9c41845e35ae441955293af302119d1c0

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In Biomaterials

1. Xiaogang Luo
2. J. Reddy
3. J. Rhim
4. M. Rezaei
5. S. H. Othman
6. M. Abdollahi

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Xiaogang Luo
2. J. Reddy
3. J. Rhim

Citations in the corpus

• Isolation of cellulose nanocrystals from onion skin and their utilization for the preparation of agar-based bio-nanocomposites films (2015, methodology): “The crystallite size (D) of the CNC was calculated by the Scherrer equation (Nazir et al. 2013).”