Development of polyvinyl alcohol/chitosan bio-nanocomposite films reinforced with cellulose nanocrystals isolated from rice straw

By A. Perumal, P. S. Sellamuthu, Reshma B. Nambiar, E. Sadiku. Applications of Surface Science, 2018

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Eco-friendly bio-nanocomposite films based on polyvinyl alcohol/chitosan (PVA/CS), reinforced with cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) were prepared by solution casting method. The CNC was successfully isolated from agriculture waste; rice straw (RS) by acid hydrolysis method and characterized with respect to their morphology, size, and thermal stability. The isolated CNC exhibited a rod-like structure with particle size around 15 nm in diameter. Subsequently, the PVA/CS films reinforced with various concentrations (1, 3, and 5 wt%) of CNC were assessed for their morphological features, thermal and mechanical properties. It was noted that the addition of RS-CNC increased the tensile strength (98.15 MPa) and thermal stability of the PVA/CS films. The bio-nanocomposites sustained similar transparency level of the PVA/CS blend film suggesting that the CNC were dispersed at the nanoscale range. The PVA/CS/CNC bio-nanocomposite film also exhibited good antifungal and antibacterial activity. Therefore, the present study suggests that the eco-friendly bio-nanocomposite film have great potential in food packaging applications.

Subfields: Biomaterials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e9ce0560f84c2695da66efccd4d8b5552b5a851