The best method for drying nanocellulose are freeze drying technique or spray drying. If you are drying nanocellulose water dispersion in hot air oven, then nanocellulose will get agglomerated due to formation of irreversible hydrogen bonds between nanocellulose that will affect the nano scale size of your nanocellulose,

But to get SEM image of your sample, if you need  to dry it in hot air oven then you can use  solvent exchange technique. For this you first exchange your solvent with acetone followed by exchange with hexane and then dry it at 50 C.

Thank you mr. Raeesh for your answer. Best regards.

Placements of my friend Raeesh are perfect.!

For a long time I tried several alternatives of drying, but the one that really was efficient was lyophilization. The solvent exchange technique during drying for the morphological analysis also helped me a lot! Perfect!

I'll try both of them, to see which one suits better. Tnx for answer.

I have also encountered a problem with drying my suspensions of Nanocellulose. I think to overcome this, freeze drying still surpasses most of the methods.

willwill the nanocrystals produced from the fibres by acid hydrolysis will be the same as the CNC obtained from commercially available cellulose

Drying is removal of a liquid from solid/semisolid/suspension nanocelluloses to produce solid product by thermal energy input causing phase change. Depend on the size of your material as well as what you are looking for (morphology, re-dispersion); you may select a right method for it. The morphological properties of the dried nanocelluloses are dependent on the particular drying method. Different technologies have been developed for drying nanocellulose at lab, pilot and large scale production such as spray drying, freeze drying, supercritical drying etc. The techniques are currently used for research development of nanocellulose and that need to be further developed for commercialization.

If any further inquiries, please feel free to communicate.

Hope this will help

Hello Aleksandar,

I am now confronting the same issue. I would like to have your suggestions on how to dry MFC for SEM analysis? Thanks.

BR

Ming

Freeze-drying

For comparison, you may refer to the following paper:

Effect of post-synthetic processing conditions on structural variations and applications of bacterial cellulose

freeze drying technique

At the Laboratory scale, freeze drying or Lyophilization proves to be a good method for obtaining cellulose nano-materials in dry form.

Freeze drying is an effective drying method, but it is costive and its efficiency is not suitable for large-scale industrial production. oven drying is preferred, but its application effect needs to be improved and verified（may you can add some chemical to prevent the Hydrogen bonding between nanocellulose in oven drying）; spray drying costs Among them, can be used as a feasible option. About spray drying ， The University of Maine has done a lot of meaningful work that you can use as a reference.