With growing environmental concerns, efforts are made to replace petroleum based products with renewable alternatives. This is particularly evident in the packaging industry, where replacing synthetic polymers with renewable materials is of considerable interest. Materials for food packaging need to give protection, acting as a barrier against substances that can adversely affect the food quality such as water and oxygen.

In this work, barrier dispersion coatings based on starch were used to produce coated papers which act as barrier against water and oxygen. However, since starch is both a hydrophilic and hygroscopic material, this barrier material becomes problematic to use at high relative humidity. In order to reduce this problem and improve the barrier properties enabling starch based barrier materials to be used in food packaging applications, two approaches were studied.

Citric acid was utilized as a cross-linker of the starch and it was found to reduce the moisture sorption, the molecular movement and swelling at high relative humidity. It was seen that cross-linking and hydrolysis due to the low pH both affected the barrier properties significantly, but in opposing directions. By controlling these two reactions it was seen that this could lead to reduced gas permeability. It was also seen that cross-linking of starch by citric acid occurs at low temperatures, 70 °C at pH as high as 6.5.

Starch nano-composites were produced by incorporating montmorillonite, to the barrier dispersion to improve the barrier properties. It was seen that the suspension viscosity was reduced by poly(ethylene glycol) and citric acid adsorption on the montmorillonite particles. Also, a tendency for improved barrier properties with reduced aggregate volume fraction and reduced swelling was observed. It was also seen that up scaling this formulation to pilot scale was possible and that promising results were achieved.

Baksidestext

With growing environmental concerns, efforts are made to replace petroleum based materials with renewable alternatives such as starch. In this work, dispersions based on starch were used to produce coated papers which act as barrier against substances that can adversely affect the food quality such as water and oxygen. However, since starch is both a hydrophilic and hygroscopic material, this barrier material becomes problematic to use at high relative humidity.

Citric acid was utilized as cross-linker for starch and it was found to reduce the moisture sorption, diffusion and swelling at high relative humidity. Both cross-linking and hydrolysis due to the low pH affected the barrier properties significantly, but in opposing directions. By controlling these two reactions it was possible to achieve reduced gas permeability.

Starch nano-composites were produced by incorporating montmorillonite clay, to the barrier dispersion. It was seen that the suspension viscosity was reduced by poly(ethylene glycol) and citric acid adsorption on the clay. Also, a tendency for improved barrier properties with reduced aggregate volume fraction and reduced swelling was observed. It was also seen that up scaling this formulation to pilot scale was possible and promising results were achieved.