Copyright 2013. Used by the Society of the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering with permission. SAMPE Technical Conference Proceedings. Wichita, KS, October 21-24, 2013. Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering. CELLULOSE MICROFIBRILS EXTRACTED FROM WHEAT STRAW: A NOVEL APPROACH Md. Nuruddin 1 , Alfred Tcherbi-Narteh 1 , Mahesh Hosur 1 , Reaz A Chowdhury 1 , S. Jeelani 1 , Peter Gichuhi 2 1 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, 2 Food and Nutrition Department Tuskegee University Tuskegee, AL 36088, USA. ABSTRACT The objective of this work was to find out the compositional characteristics of wheat straw in terms of cellulose and lignin contents and assess the suitability of wheat straw for isolation of cellulose microfibrils. The fractionation process includes formic acid/peroxyformic acid treatment, bleaching and ball milling of bleached cellulose. 39.10 % Cellulose, 20.40 % lignin and 25.02 % of other compounds were extracted. Extracted cellulose was characterized using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), scanning electron micrograph (SEM), and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Morphological and thermal analyses studies showed that the extracted microfibrils had reduced length and diameter and showed good thermal stability suitable for various advanced nano technological applications. 1. INTRODUCTION Wheat straw is one of the important agricultural waste and abundant renewable cellulose resources. This cellulose is a valuable raw material- for pulp and paper industry, and microfibrils for green composites [1-3]. In addition to this, some useful chemical compounds such as ethanol can be produced from wheat straw as studies have shown [4-6]. Cell wall of wheat straw mainly consists of lignin, hemicelluloses and cellulose in addition to small amount of pectin, pigment and extractives. Each fiber of wheat straw is considered as natural composite in which cellulose is embedded in the matrix, which is composed of lignin and hemicellulose. Hemicellulose forms crosslink network with pectin to microfibrils, while lignin acts as binder which strengthens the crosslink network. Cellulose is one of many natural polymers consisting of linear homopolysaccharide, consisting of unbranched β-(1,4)-D-glucose units linked together by β-1-4-linkages. Each monomer glucose unit carries three hydroxyl groups. These hydroxyl groups located at the position of C2 and C3 (secondary hydroxyl groups) and C6 (Primary hydroxyl groups) can form intra and inter molecular hydrogen bond shown in Figure 1. These bonds can provide highly ordered three dimensional crystalline structure, thus, these hydroxyl groups are able to form hydrogen bonds which control physical properties of cellulose [7].