OBTAINING AND CHARACTERIZING CELLULOSE HYGROGELS FROM TEXTILE INDUSTRY WASTE
Textile industry, Cellulose waste, Hydrogels, Cotton, Swelling.
Cellulose is one of the most abundant polymers in nature and its structure is composed of interactions such as intra and intermolecular hydrogen bonds, in these bonds there are strong tendencies for cellulose to form crystals making it insoluble in water and most organic solvents. Several works published in the literature present the synthesis of hydrogel from the analytical standard cellulose with a high degree of purity, provided by different laboratories, which facilitate the dissolution process and later, the manufacture of hydrogel. Its application is vast and multidisciplinary, in different industrial areas such as biomedical, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, engineering, fuel, biomaterials, wasterwater treatment, drug delivery and fertilizers. Due to this theme and its diversity of application, as well as, using environmentally friendly and sustainable ways, this work aims to produce the hydrogel using cellulose in its raw form, from the cotton residue from the sanding process in the textile industry. Using up cycling as the object of using this residue without application and which had the purpose of being discarded as process waste. Thus, the cellulosic material was collected from a local industry and previously dissolved in NaOH/Urea proportions with controlled temperature and time and then cross-linked in an epichlorohydrin solution. Finally, the resulting solution underwent a freezing and thawing process. The hydrogel obtained was characterized in terms of its microstructure via FTIR, XRD and SEM-FEG as well as thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The result obtained proves that the process of obtaining the hydrogel depends on the concentration of the crosslinking agent and with a high degree of swelling. It is then concluded that the use of cellulose residue from the textile industry, from the physical sanding process, has a wide application in obtaining cellulose hydrogels.