The morphologies of aerogels were observed by SEM (
JSM 6700F, JEOL, Tokyo, Japan) at 3 kV accelerating voltage. Compressive tests were performed on an Instron high-capability 5900 series press (Instron Co., Norwood, MA, USA)) with a 500 N cell at a constant rate of 2 mm/min in triplicate. The CpA aerogels were compressed along the thickness direction up to 80% strain. Zeta potentials of pure CNF, pDA, CNF-g-pDA, AF and CpA at pH of 2.5, 7.0 and 8.5 were measured by
ZEN 3600 zetasizer (Malvern Instruments, Worcestershire, UK) with a 4 mW laser (wavelength of 632.8 nm). The number of measurements per scan were determined automatically by the instrument. The FT-IR analysis was conducted by Bruker
Tensor 27 IR Spectrometer (Bruker Optic GmbH, Ettlingen, Germany). The porosity of the aerogels was determined by calculation using Equation (1) [35 (
link)]:
where
is the aerogel density, which is calculated by taking the mass of the aerogel (measured by a balance) and dividing it by the determined volume of the aerogel (determined by optical microscopy images taken using Leica MZ12). The
and
are the densities of CNF and AF, respectively,
and
are the weight fractions of the CNF and AF fibrils.
Sorriaux M., Sorieul M, & Chen Y. (2021). Bio-Based and Robust Polydopamine Coated Nanocellulose/Amyloid Composite Aerogel for Fast and Wide-Spectrum Water Purification. Polymers, 13(19), 3442.