Abstract
Our NMR experiments show that chitin can dissolve well in aqueous KOH through a freeze-thawing process, and the dissolution power of the alkali solvent systems is in the order of KOH > NaOH > LiOH aqueous solution, which is totally contrary to that of cellulose in the alkali aqueous solution (i.e., LiOH > NaOH ≫ KOH). In this work, we systematically study the dissolution process in KOH and KOH/urea aqueous solutions. Chitin has good solubility (solubility ~80 %) in 8.4–25 wt% KOH aqueous solution at −30 °C. The role of urea also has been investigated: unlike aqueous chitin-NaOH solutions, urea indeed enhances the solubility of chitin in KOH aqueous solutions, but the increased degree becomes unobtrusive with decreasing temperature and increasing dissolution time; the DA decline curves of chitin-KOH and chitin-KOH/urea aqueous solutions are nearly overlapping, indicating that the effect of the urea on the degree of acetylation of chitin in KOH aqueous solutions is small, similar to the NaOH/urea solvent.
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