Synthesis of thermally protective PET–PEG multiblock copolymers as food packaging materials

Abstract

One of the storage conditions affecting quality of food stuffs due to short shelf life is temperature. Thermal insulation can be achieved by adding phase change materials (PCMs) to packaging materials. PCMs store and release latent heat of phase change during melting and crystallization operations, respectively. Thus, they can provide thermal protection for packaged foods. The aim of this study is to prepare new food packaging materials poly (ethylene terephthalate)–poly (ethylene glycol) (PET–PEG) multiblock copolymers as solid–solid phase change materials (SSPCM) as potential food packaging materials with thermal energy storage (TES) property. Polyesterification was carried out with PEG at different average molecular weights (1000, 4000 and 10,000 g/mol), ethylene glycol (EG) and terephthaloyl chloride (TPC). Synthesized PET–PEG multiblock copolymers were characterized using Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) methods. The crystal structures of PET–PEG multiblock copolymers were characterized by polarized optical microscopy (POM) and their surface properties were determined by performing contact angle tests. TES capacity of the PET–PEG multiblock copolymers was found in range of 26.1–150.5 J/g. Consequently, this study demonstrates the potential of PET–PEG multiblock copolymers suitable for effective thermal preservation in packaging material applications to maintain the quality of packaged food stuffs.

Multiple H‐Bonding Cross‐Linked Supramolecular Solid–Solid Phase Change Materials for Thermal Energy Storage and Management

“…In Table S5, Supporting Information, the TES performance of MHPCM-10K 95 and MHPCM-20K 97 is compared with other literatures, and it indicates that the enthalpies of our work are superior than the most reported SSPCMs in the literature. [26,33,[50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62] Figure 3d presents a summary of the tensile stresses and corresponding enthalpy of phase transition for MHPCM in this work, as well as other PCMs reported in the literature. As shown in Figure 3d, our work exhibits a superior tensile stress of 36.9 MPa and a high enthalpy of phase transition of 142.5 J g −1 , which represents the best comprehensive performance compared to other PCMs reported in the literature.…”