Detoxification Properties of Guanidinylated Chitosan Against Chemical Warfare Agents and Its Application to Military Protective Clothing.

Woong Kwon,Euigyung Jeong

doi:10.3390/polym12071461

Abstract

This study investigates the detoxification properties of guanidinylated chitosan against chemical warfare agents and its application to the preparation of military protective clothing. Guanidinylated chitosan was synthesized by chitosan guanidinylation with cyanamide. The detoxification properties of the guanidinylated chitosan were then evaluated using a chemical warfare agent simulant, called diisopropylfluorophosphate (DFP). Cotton fabric was treated with 1 wt.% of guanidinylated chitosan in acetic acid and water solution using the simple and conventional textile treatment method of pad–dry–cure. The detoxification properties of the guanidinylated chitosan-treated cotton fabric were evaluated to investigate the application of guanidinylated chitosan to the preparation of military protective clothing. Subsequently, 71.3% of DFP was hydrolyzed to non-hazardous diisopropylhydrogenphosphate (DHP) in 2 h because of the base organocatalytic activity of 0.02 g guanidinylated chitosan itself. Moreover, 60.1% of DFP was hydrolyzed by the catalytic activity of the guanidinylated chitosan-treated cotton fabric, which contained only 0.0002 g of guanidinylated chitosan. This result shows that the guanidinylated chitosan itself has detoxification properties for hydrolyzing DFP to DHP, and its detoxification properties can be more efficient when applied to cotton fabric because it showed 84.3% of the detoxification properties with only 1 wt.% of guanidinylated chitosan. For the first time, this study shows that guanidinylated chitosan has considerable detoxification properties and can be used as an agent to prepare protective clothing.

Highlights

Protecting the human body against chemical warfare agents (CWAs) is one of the most important functions of military protective clothing
This study proposes the use of guanidinylated chitosan as a detoxification fabric treatment
Chitosan, cyanamide (99%), and diisopropylfluorophosphate (DFP) were purchased from analyzer (Flash 2000, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waltham, MA, USA)

Summary

Introduction

Protecting the human body against chemical warfare agents (CWAs) is one of the most important functions of military protective clothing. Permeable protective clothing is comfortable when worn because it allows heat, air, and moisture to penetrate the fabric [1,2,3,4,5]. The adsorbing materials of permeable protective clothing adsorb only limited amounts of CWAs. the protection time duration is limited by the adsorbing capacity of the adsorbent used [4,5]. The protection time duration is limited by the adsorbing capacity of the adsorbent used [4,5] To overcome these disadvantages, many research projects have studied detoxifying materials that can decompose CWAs into non-hazardous materials and their application to fabrics for preparing protective clothing with detoxification properties [6,7,8,9,10,11,12]

Methods

Results

Conclusion