Procedure Followed in Etherification

Cotton linters or wood pulp, usually in the form of sheets, is steeped in strong alkali (18-50%). The swollen sheets are then pressed to force out most of the excess alkali solution. This alkali cellulose is then shredded, and aged if low viscosity is desired. The aging process is the one followed in the viscose industry and is fully explained in any discussion of that process. More alkali may be introduced during the shredding, either as a concentrated solution or as solid alkali. The alkali 

---

The synthesis of acrylate materials is relatively straight forward, and can be performed without the recourse to complex reagents and equipment, but, because of the polymerization step may require particular care to ensure the purity of the final material. This is particularly so in the following example, where a cyanobenzoate ester is used to provide the anisotropic phase structure, since the electron-withdrawing group makes this ester particularly susceptible to hydrolysis. The first step in the production of a mesogenic monomer involves the acetylation of 6-chlorohexanol using a standard preparative procedure,followed by etherification and subsequent hydrolysis as shown in Scheme 1. 

Interrupted-decoupling CP/MAS NMR spectra of softwoods show a band of signals from about 140 to 156 ppm, with some evidence of partly resolved structure. Variations in the shape of this band are attributed to variations in the abundance of fi-O-4 ether linkages. The degree of etherification can be estimated by curve fitting. The procedure described here follows Leary et al. (1987). 

---