Patience is a virtue: self-assembly and physico-chemical properties of cellulose nanocrystal allomorphs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) are bio-based rod-like nanoparticles with a quickly expanding market. Despite the fact that a variety of production routes and starting cellulose sources are employed, all industrially produced CNCs consist of cellulose I (CNC-I), the native crystalline allomorph of cellulose. Here a comparative study of the physico-chemical properties and liquid crystalline behavior of CNCs produced from cellulose II (CNC-II) and typical CNC-I is reported. CNC-I and CNC-II are isolated by sulfuric acid hydrolysis of cotton and mercerized cotton, respectively. The two allomorphs display similar surface charge densities and ζ-potentials and both have a right-handed twist, but CNC-II have a slightly smaller average length and aspect ratio, and are less hygroscopic. Interestingly, the self-assembly behavior of CNC-I and CNC-II in water is different. Whilst CNC-I forms a chiral nematic phase, CNC-II initially phase separates into an upper isotropic and a lower nematic liquid crystalline phase, before a slow reorganization into a large-pitch chiral nematic texture occurs. This is potentially caused by a combination of factors, including the inferred faster rotational diffusion of CNC-II and the different crystal structures of CNC-I and CNC-II, which are responsible for the presence and absence of a giant dipole moment, respectively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".