Toward transparent rigid packaging from sugarcane bagasse: a consistency-testing framework for nanocellulose–chitosan sheets
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Transparent rigid packaging is dominated by fossil-derived polymers, whereas fiber-based packaging is opaque. Dense cellulose nanofibril (CNF) and nanocrystal sheets are transparent as flat films, but whether transparency, wet stiffness and a three-dimensional shape can coexist in one sugarcane-bagasse-derived package has not been established, and one reported attempt to mold transparent CNF objects failed through drying shrinkage. This paper reports no experiments. It applies three consistency screens to a proposed bagasse CNF–chitosan–wax architecture: an optical screen derived from Debye–Bueche scattering theory, a wet-stiffness screen and a geometric forming screen, each propagated through a seeded Monte Carlo analysis over ranges traced to cited literature or explicitly stated assumptions. Under the stated optical-screen assumptions, a 100 µm wall at 10% haze and 5% voids requires a correlation length of about 10 nm or less, and because stiffness fixes a minimum wall thickness, the liquid the package must resist feeds back into the optical budget. Chitosan raises modeled wet stiffness mainly through cross-linking (median gain +1.1 GPa with it, -0.1 GPa without), but its gain in an acidic liquid is small and of uncertain sign. A tray, bowl and cup need total strain tolerances of 0.26, 0.67 and 1.10; no combination of the assumed ranges forms the cup (best case 0.96), which would need a flange wrinkling strain above 0.64. Pass shares depend on the priors, whereas the thresholds, the cup bound and the rank ordering do not. Barrier performance is untested, so every feasibility result is provisional.
Source: ChemRxiv
Author: Leon Sandler
Language: English
Subfield: Biomaterials
Field: Materials Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7216513303
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: