Electrospun mats of high chitosan content

U. CASADO; N. MARCOVICH; PABLO C. CARACCIOLO; G.A. ABRAHAM; M.I. ARANGUREN

Visegrád

Congreso; 2nd International Conference on Bio-based Polymers and Composites (BiPoCo 2014); 2014

Laboratory of Plastics and Rubber Technology, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary

Chitosan-based fibrous structures are receiving attention because of their potential in many fields, such as food and pharmaceutical industry, environmental and biomedical engineering. Many of these applications require highly porous materials with high surface area-to-volume ratio, high-interconnected porosity and controlled pore size. Electrospinning is a very effective technique to produce micro/nanofibrous matrices. The preparation of reproducible structures depends of processing parameters (applied voltage, nozzle-to-collector distance, flow rate) and solution properties (molar mass, concentration, solvents, viscosity, surface tension, electrical conductivity). Thus, the optimization of the variables involved in the process is required to produce well-controlled morphologies. Chitosan is a polysaccharide derived from chitin, which is mainly obtained from the exoskeleton of crustaceous and other shell-marine animals. It is biodegradable, biocompatible and it has antifungal and antibacterial activity. However, chitosan as well as other biopolymers exhibit poor electrospinnability because it has a polycationic character in acidic aqueous solutions that excessively increase the surface tension of the solution, forming strong H-bonded networks, depending on the molecular weight, concentration and degree of deacetilation. The aim of this work was to obtain electrospun mats with high chitosan content.