Structural changes during heterogeneous sulfation and following homogenization of cotton cellulose

We used to consider native cellulose to be composed of microfibrils continuously crystalline along the chain direction with constant lateral dimension. To sulfate the surface of cellulose microfibrils, we activated cotton fibers by pre-swelling in water or DMF followed by immersion in an excess amount of sulfamic acid in dimethylformamide (DMF) in heterogeneous conditions. The degree of sulfation was followed by elemental analysis and conductometric titration, while the structural changes associated with the sulfation and the homogenization were investigated by infrared spectroscopy, solid-state NMR, and X-ray diffraction. The initial sulfation of the cellulose surface was well described as a first order reaction with a kinetic constant of 2\(\times\)10\(^{-3}\)s\(^{-1}\) at 80 °C using 3.6% sulfamic, indicating that about half of the available hydroxy groups were sulfated within the first 5 min. A water pre-swelling step, followed by solvent exchange with DMF, increased the amount of available hydroxy groups by up to a factor of two. At long reaction times, there was a gradual increase in the degree of sulfation beyond the initially available surface by up to 20% during the two hours reaction investigated. FTIR and solid-state NMR spectra both suggest the reaction of surface primary hydroxy groups with sulfamic acid. While the apparent lateral crystallite size of cotton is unaffected by sulfation treatment, X-ray diffraction suggested that homogenization resulted in cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) with a crystallite width below 3 nm, much smaller than the initial cellulose microfibrils (6–7 nm). This apparent crystallite splitting during homogenization suggests that cotton microfibrils have an intertwined polycrystalline structure, rather than being monocrystalline along the whole length.