The reaction between cyanuric chloride (trichloro-s-triazine)
and cellulose is presented in Scheme 1. The substitution was restricted to just one of the three chlorines in cyanuric chloride by controlling the reaction temperature (Lenfeld et al., 1995; Pardal et al., 2001).
Specifically, 2 g of MCC and 8 mL of acetone were mixed in a three-neck flask and stirred for 80 min under N2 atmosphere at 20 °C. Later, 4 mL of aqueous NaOH solution (4%) was added. The mixture was stirred for another 1 h, cooled down to 0 °C. Cyanuric chloride dissolved in acetone was introduced dropwise and then the reaction system was kept at 0 °C for 4 h. After that, the mixture was centrifugally separated, and the product (chemically modified cellulose) was washed with 40 mL of acetone and 40 mL of ice-cold water, centrifuged again and vacuum dried at 50 °C for 12 h, and then stored in a vacuum drier (Lenfeld et al., 1995; Pardal et al., 2001).