Preparation and characterisation of nano-scale cotton powder

Abstract

Cotton fibre has played an important role in textile materials since ancient times and it is still widely used in the modern textile industry for its high quality. Superfine cotton powders have been produced from cotton fibres by special pretreatment with the aid of specially designed machines and technology. Such superfine powders can be widely applied in new biomedical material development and cosmetic products. In this article, a newly developed method for producing micro-scales and nano-scales powders is proposed. The scanning electron micrographs showed that superfine cotton powders with various sizes of the order of microscale and nanoscale were produced from the cotton fibres of around 10 to 20 microns in diameter after pulverisation processes. The particle size of the powders was further confirmed to be in both microscales and nanoscales size range by means of the particle size analyser. Fourier transform infrared analysis shows that there was some change in the chemical structure of cotton after pulverisation processes. The crystallinity of the cotton powders decreases tremendously when the particle sizes decrease to nanoscale.