Among all biomass sources, cellulose is the most diverse material sourced from plants and is abundant in nature. It possesses some promising properties such as biodegradability, biocompatibility and hydrophilicity. In several industrial biomasses, the waste products especially for food manufacture have high content of cellulose and their disposals are serious in reuse problem. Therefore, people have given attention with regard to their regeneration to the useful materials. In this chapter, it is worth noting to describe that natural biomass cellulose is usefully applied with the regeneration to functional hydrogel films. The treatment processes of the bagasse waste used as a main source of cellulose and the fabrication of hydrogel films are described and their potential characteristics, especially on the medical field are reviewed.
TopIntroduction
Cellulose is one of structural component in green plants and is the most common organic compound on earth. Now in our days, several approaches mainly undergo the effective uses of biomass as alternative energy source as biofuel (Edgar, Buchanan, Debenham, Rundquist, Seiler, & Shelton, 2001). But, the elaboration of cellulose material is very limited to cover society necessities. It is recognized that the importance is to protect earth environment by promoting the reuse of the waste products. The potential uses of the bagasse cellulose are important. For example, in the food industries using sugarcane for fermentation and agave to production of tequila, the bagasse is fibrous after sugarcane or agave is crushed to extract their juice. In the cellulose regeneration processes, due to mainly obtaining cellulose fibers from bagasse, the chemical treatment of the cellulosic fibers is a crucial point. The treatments diminish the structure of the fibers helping to extract non-cellulosic compounds as lignin and others. In this process, cellulose leaving high cellulose content is necessary for the regeneration process.
Among their applications, cellulosic hydrogel is one of candidate material having a three dimensional network of crosslinked swellable of water liquid in the polymer chains (Liu, Ma, Mao, & Gao, 2011). This is because that cellulose exhibits hydrophilic nature, the hydrogel application is widely potential in several fields of food, agriculture, environmental remediation and medical using as biomaterials. However, several approaches failed due to their poor properties of less solubility and the self-standing scaffold. In biocompatibility, biodegradability and hydrophilicity, it is much interesting to focus on their characteristic properties of the regenerated cellulose. Therefore, to re-use for the development of functional materials is advance. Since the chains crosslinked chemically or physically each other, hydrogels are insoluble in water. In contact therewith swelling considerably increasing their volume is caused, but maintaining its shape is led to be elastic. Its hydrophilic characteristic is because of the presence of OH-groups in the chain of cellulose. In fact, hydrogels have wide potential applications in the fields (Sionkowske, 2011; Chen, Yuan, Song, Wu, & Li, 2008). Rapid progress has been made recently in the field of biomedical materials, which utilize both natural and synthetic polymers. Thus, cellulose-based materials can be used in a variety of applications, including wound closure (Lloyd, Kennedy, Methacanon, Paterson, & Knill, 1998), drug delivery systems (Nair & Laurencin, 2007), novel vascular grafts (Chandy & Sharma, 1998), or scaffolds for in vitro or in vivo tissue engineering (Cai, Sharma, Lui, Mu, Lui, Zhang, & Deng, 2014). As mentioned, biopolymers are important in all aspects of medicine, surgery and healthcare. Because of the increasing demand for environmentally friendly and biocompatible products, such application of cellulose hydrogels involves casting membranes and sponges for food companies, flexible gels and weak gels for industry, films and membranes for medical applications.