The most abundant natural resource: Cellulose and its derivatives and their applications

Abstract

Man, since his birth, continues to search for renewable natural resources. If we look at our surroundings, cellulose is the only natural renewable carbohydrate that is present in abundance. Cellulose is a polysaccharide consisting of a linear chain of several hundred to over ten thousand ß-(1-4)-linked glucose repeating units. At present, cellulose is being applied in several fields like pharmaceuticals, food, paint, textiles, paper, and building industries for its qualities of being, non-toxic, easily biodegradable and the most important, its ability to change its physical and chemical properties to suit a specific application. Though cellulose is plentiful, it is not utilized completely due to the fact of being insoluble. This is primarily ascribable to the presence of numerous intermolecular and intramolecular hydrogen bonds. In this regard, many attempts were made to synthesize new cellulose derivatives and obtained successful results. In this chapter, we will discuss cellulose and its derivatives, and their application in various fields. © 2015 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.