Physical and Chemical Properties of Materials Based on Hydrolyzed Chitosan

Noa Gavriely and Tal Bino, Chemical Engineering, Technion, Haifa, Israel

In a world that its population grow every year; the energy consumption is increasing rapidly, there is a need in renewable energy. One of the possibilities is reaction of biomass to recycle energy. Those reactions are endothermic and therefore, a catalyst is necessary. A homogenous catalyst is already working but is very hard to separate to two different phases. The solution is to find heterogeneous catalyst that will naturally separates to two phases. The polymer that been chosen to work with is Chitosan (CS).
Chitin is the second most abundant naturally available polymer consists of β-(1–4)-2-acetamido-2-deoxy-D-glucopyranose units. In the solid-state CS is a semi crystalline polymer and exhibits excellent chemical properties, biodegradability, biocompatibility, hemostatic activity, low toxicity and wound-healing properties.

The main goal is to control the hydrolysis reaction of CS that will be achieved by understand the effect of the hydrolysis on the microstructure by changing the residence time of the CS in the HCl solution

FTIR analysis shows that the long the residence time, the ratio between C-O-C bonds to C-H, CH2 bonds is reaching a plateau. N2-Physisorption showed that the isotherm type is type 2 and the hysteresis in most of our example is H-4, which means there is micropores to macropores structure.