Hesam Omrani Fard; Mohammad Hossein Abaspour fard; Mehdi Khojastehpour; Ali Dashti
Abstract
Introduction: One of the new methods for improving the mechanical properties of bioplastics is the production of blending based bioplastics. Recent studies show that proteins, in combination with starch, form a strong network of hydrogen bonds and intermolecular interactions that resulted stable 3-D ...
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Introduction: One of the new methods for improving the mechanical properties of bioplastics is the production of blending based bioplastics. Recent studies show that proteins, in combination with starch, form a strong network of hydrogen bonds and intermolecular interactions that resulted stable 3-D materials. The big problem in the commercialization of blending based bioplastics is the lack of industrial machinery for the continuous production of bioplastics with the direct use of biopolymers. Industrial production of bioplastics is accompanied by increasing heat along with applying the pressure. It is necessary to know the kinetics of thermal degradation of bioplastics to study thermal behavior at different temperatures in order to design bioplastics processing devices and molding machines, software modeling of processes, mass and energy equilibrium, and optimizing energy consumption in the production process along with improving the thermal properties of the bioplastics.
Materials and methods: In this study, the dynamics thermal decomposition of bioplastics prepared from a mixture of potato whole flour-gelatin and glycerol with a control sample consisting of potato whole flour and glycerol was investigated and compared. The gelatin was extracted from chicken feet using chemical methods. In this research, two isoconversional models including Flynn-Wall-Ozawa (FWO) and Kissinger-Akahira-Sunose (KAS) models were considered. Using each of these models, thermal decomposition kinetic parameters were calculated for bioplastic samples.
Result and discussion: The results showed that the maximum activation energy of the mixed bioplastics determined 162 and 150 kJ/mol by FWO method at the conversion ratio of 0.9 and 0.5 respectively, while it was 217 kJ/mol at the ratio of 0.6 for control bioplastics. The amounts of kinetic parameters calculated in this study, were able to determine the thermal behavior at different temperatures and the thermal decomposition process. Also, it can help to redesign and optimize the methods of molding and shaping of potato-gelatin based bioplastics by the use of existing machinery in the industry.
