Fabrication of Hydrophobic Lignin-Based Films through Tandem Chemical Modification and Plasma Treatment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fully renewable hydrophobic materials offer a promising solution to addressing environmental challenges. Lignin, a relatively underutilized renewable polymer that naturally exhibits hydrophobicity, shows potential as a blend material in various applications. However, current approaches using technical lignin as a primary component or additive in renewable film manufacturing often rely on nonrenewable, external hydrophobic agents. Here, we developed a tandem strategy to create a fully renewable, hydrophobic lignin-based film. First, lignin was esterified by incorporating long-chain palmitic groups to enhance its hydrophobicity. A poly[( R )-3-hydroxybutyrate] (PHB) film containing 20% palmitoylated lignin demonstrated improved hydrophobicity, with the water contact angle (WCA) increasing from 75.4 to 106.7°. To further enhance hydrophobicity, the film underwent oxygen plasma treatment, which introduced macroscopic surface roughness in the form of “nanoforests.” This treatment significantly increased the WCA to 139°, confirming the effectiveness of the tandem strategy for producing hydrophobic 2D materials. Molecular dynamics simulations revealed that the C16 chain in palmitoylated lignin created a more compact complex with PHB through strong van der Waals interactions and optimized hydrogen bonding, suggesting potential for developing high-lignin-content films. This work demonstrates a facile approach for fabricating fully renewable, hydrophobic composite films without the need for external materials.
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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".