Phase diagram of the ternary system NMMO/water/cellulose

The phase diagram of the system N-methylmorpholine-N-oxide(NMMO)/H₂O/cellulose has been measured at 80 °C by establishing a solubility map (observation of the mixtures under the microscope), by the analysis of coexisting phases and determining the critical point. These experiments manifest a continuous reduction of the two phase area existing for the subsystem H₂O/cellulose upon the addition of NMMO, where a weight fraction of NMMO in the mixed solvent exceeding 75 wt% is required for Solucell 400 to reach the critical composition. The critical cellulose concentration is only 0.34 wt%, i.e., more than an order of magnitude lower than for the solutions of typical vinyl polymers in mixed solvents. All experimental observations can be well modeled on the basis of composition dependent binary interaction parameters by means of recently established mixing rules. For the subsystems H₂O/cellulose and NMMO/water the corresponding data are known from independent earlier measurements. The adjustment of two parameters to the ternary phase diagram was required to obtain this information for NMMO/cellulose, the third binary subsystem.