Experimental characterisation of nanofibrillated cellulose foams

There is a growing interest in applications for nanofibrillated cellulose based materials owing to their exceptional mechanical properties. Nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) foam is one such derivative which has potential applications in a wide array of fields. Here, we characterise the mechanical properties of two particular high porosity NFC foams (98.13 and 98.96 %) prepared by a freeze drying process. We evaluate their behaviour in uni-axial and bi-axial compression with cyclic loading. The secondary loading cycles reveal complete irreversible damage of the microstructure, with the secondary loading path being characterised by near zero plateau stress. In force controlled tests, negligible hysteresis corroborates the idea that there is no energy dissipation owing to near complete microstructural damage. Furthermore, we observe no indications of preferential orientation of the microstructure in these tests. The stress responses in mutually perpendicular directions are seen to be identical, within statistical considerations. We then utilise the “pseudo-elastic” model developed and adopt it to the case of highly compressible Ogden strain energy formulation with a modified neo-Hookean for the unloading, with a view of fitting a continuum hyperelastic model to the experimental data. The material parameters obtained from uni-axial data are seen to be insufficient to describe the more general bi-axial deformation. The parameters obtained from the bi-axial test describe uni-axial deformation up to stretches of ~0.5 but overestimate the stress levels beyond that point.