Comparing Degradation Pattern and Mode of Scission of Cellulose in Hydrothermal System with Pattern from Matlab Simulation

Cellulose is a bioorganic polymer formed from condensation polymerization of glucose. This biopolymer is used in several industrial and biomedical applications such as scaffold in tissue engineering. The objective of this work is to determine the pattern of cellulose degradation and its mode of scission in subcritical and supercritical water. One feasible way of approaching this task is modeling cellulose chain degradation based on different modes of scission, and simultaneously simulate the molecular weight distribution of the degraded chains. Cellulose was scission in the hydrothermal system at different temperature and residence time while the simulation was conducted using exact algebraic statistical formulations as the governing equations for the different modes of cellulose glycosidic bonds scission. MATLAB was used as the computational platform for the simulation and size exclusion chromatography was used to generate the molecular weight distribution for the degraded cellulose chains in subcritical and supercritical water. The modeled molecular weight distribution was used to fingerprint the molecular weight distribution generated from experimentally degraded cellulose chains at the subcritical and supercritical conditions of water. It is observed that none of the molecular weight distributions obtained based on the different modes of scission was able to fingerprint the corresponding MW distributions obtained from the experiment. The study shows that cellulose bond scission follow a random pattern when degraded in a hydrothermal system.