Abstract
Agriculture is an important sector of the economy, but this industry consumes significant amounts of water, which is a precious and limited natural resource. Irrigation techniques and efforts to mitigate water usage influence the growth, survival, and yield of crops. However, superabsorbent polymers in combination with fertilizers can be employed to obtain sustained release of nutrients and improved water retention capacity of the soil. Despite significant recent progress in this area involving synthetic polyacrylate hydrogels, there are no industrially applicable solutions exhibiting similar performance using natural biopolymers or synthetic polymers enriched with natural components. This review focuses on biodegradable chitosan-based hydrogels (both natural and semi-synthetic), and discusses their potential agricultural and horticultural applications. The methods for synthesizing hydrogels via physical or chemical crosslinking, and the resulting functional properties of recently reported hydrogels, such as water retention and release of active ingredients, are presented herein.
Highlights
Hydrogels are crosslinked polymers with hydrophilic groups, which can absorb a large amount of water without being dissolved in it [1,2,3]
In general superabsorbent polymer hydrogels are based on ionic monomers and are lightly crosslinked; they display an exceptional capacity of water absorption, significantly higher than highly crosslinked hydrogels made of nonionic monomers
The combination of slow-release fertilizers and superabsorbent polymers is desirable because they may improve water absorbency and nutrient release into the soil. This approach was described by Wu and Liu [33], who prepared a three-layer system in which the core was a granular nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) fertilizer, the inner coating was CS, and the outer coating was a poly(acrylic acid-co-acrylamide) (poly(AA-co-AM)) superabsorbent polymer (Table 1, entry 1, Figure 1)
Summary
Research and Innovation Department, Grupa Azoty Zakłady Azotowe Kedzierzyn S.A., Mostowa 30A, 47 220 Kedzierzyn-Koźle, Poland.
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