Swelling Resistance and Water-Induced Shape Memory Performances of Sisal Cellulose Nanofibers/Polyethylene Glycol/Citric Acid Nanocellulose Papers

In this work, a kind of nanocomposite paper was obtained by evaporation-induced self-assembly of a mixture of sisal cellulose nanofibers (CNF) and polyethylene glycol (PEG) as the matrix and citric acid (CA) as a cross-linking agent. The CNF/PEG/CA paper exhibited good water swelling resistance which could be controlled by changing the concentration of CA. In addition, this nanocomposite paper exhibited good mechanical properties and water-induced shape memory performance. In particular, when the dosage of CA was 30 wt.%, the tensile strength and the tensile modulus of the CNF/PEG/CA paper after swelling were 25.2 MPa and 813.0 MPa, respectively. Further, this nanocomposite showed great potential for water-induced shape memory materials with fast response speed. The shape recovery rate (Rr) of the CNF/PEG/CA paper reached 90.2% with 30 wt.% CA after being immersed in water for 11 s. It is anticipated that our current work can be used to exploit more efficient methods to overcome the poor water swelling resistance of the cellulose-based shape memory materials.