Facile Preparation of Cellulose/Polylactide Composite Materials with Tunable Mechanical Properties

ABSTRACTA solvent-free route was developed to fabricate 100% biobased, renewable, and degradable polylactide (PLA) composites reinforced with ball-milled celluloses. The results show that the original pulp cellulose fibers were modified to partial amorphization through 30-min ball milling. Filling the ball milled celluloses into PLA increased the tensile modulus for the resultant cellulose/PLA composite materials, while decreased their tensile strength and impact resistance. This method can be used to access the cost-efficient PLA-based composite materials with tunable mechanical properties. The variation analysis shows that filling content contributed more to the variations of their mechanical properties than that particle size did.