Polymer organogelation with chitin and chitin nanocrystals

Abstract

In this paper, we show that biodegradable and biocompatible organogels can be formed with chitin as the filler material and triglycerides as the continuous hydrophobic phase. When crude chitin was used, a large degree of aggregation was observed that prevented the formation of stable organogels. Two approaches were used to diminish this degree of aggregation and increase the stability. Either surfactants were used to increase the dispersability of the crude chitin, or the crude chitin was transformed into smaller rodlike nanocrystals by acid hydrolysis. Both approaches led to the formation of stable organogels with storage moduli up to 10 6 Pa for high chitin concentrations (20 wt%). Three different types of surfactants were used, namely phosphatidylcholine, enzymatically modified phosphatidylcholine and sorbitan monostearate (Span 60). The choice of surfactant has a large influence on the gel strength and the temperature sensitivity of the gels. With chitin nanocrystals, in the presence of surfactants, larger gel strengths were observed for lower concentrations (1-10 wt%), indicating more efficient packing of the particles. Gels were stable even after addition of considerable amounts of water up to 25 wt%. The increase in gel strength in the presence of water (storage modulus) was most likely an effect of the water absorption ability of chitin that increased the effective volume fraction of the fillers.

Cellulose ether oleogels obtained by emulsion-templated approach without additional thickeners

“…However, in this group is ethylcellulose (EC) which is an extremely effective oleogelator, but has the limitation of requiring high heating temperatures, above their glass transition temperature (approximately 140 °C) (Dey, Kim & Marangoni, 2011;Laredo, Barbut, & Marangoni, 2011;Zetzl, Marangoni, & Barbut, 2012). Another example of a biopolymer with gelling capacity is chitin, which can be used as nanocrystals (Nikiforidis & Scholten, 2015) or modified as hydrophobic whiskers (Huang, He, Lu, Zhou, Stoyanov, Pelan, & Zhang, 2015).…”

Controlling Agglomeration of Protein Aggregates for Structure Formation in Liquid Oil: A Sticky Business

“…28,29 Another example of a biopolymer studied for its oil structuring ability is the polysaccharide chitin. Modifying crude chitin into “nanocrystals” 30 or hydrophobic “whiskers” 31 was necessary to efficiently provide a structure to liquid oil. To overcome the problem of low dispersibility of biopolymers, other researchers have adopted a foam- or emulsion-template approach.…”

Chitin and carbon nanotube composites as biocompatible scaffolds for neuron growth

“…However ionic liquids based solvents allow effective dissolution and processing of chitin. It is now being used extensively in different forms, such as foams [13][14][15] , fibres 16,17 , gels [18][19][20] , micro particles 21 , nanoparticles [22][23][24] and nanofibers [25][26][27] , for a variety of biomedical applications [28][29][30] . Chitin is the second most abundant biopolymer after cellulose.…”