Abstract
Paper packaging materials have been widely applied in our daily life. To maintain the quality of packed goods as well as the mechanical property, there is a need to enhance the paper water vapor barrier function. Although long-chain cellulose esters with saturated aliphatic chains have been employed as barrier coatings due to their excellent hydrophobicity as well as film-forming properties, the coated unsaturated cellulose esters would be beneficial to design reactive materials to further enrich their functionalities, e.g., antibacterial performance. Herein, solutions of cellulose undecenoyl esters (CUEs) were bar-coated to base papers. Obvious coating films were formed on the paper surfaces from the coating grammage of 6.25 g m−2. The resulting CUE-coated papers displayed good mechanical performance, hydrophobicity, and water vapor barrier property (the barrier ratio up to 66.35%), and the best coating grammage was 11.62 g m−2. Additionally, the reactivity of the coated paper was evaluated by further immobilization of the antibacterial agent (polyhexamethylene guanidine hydrochloride (PHGH)) using photo-click thiol-ene and condensation reaction. The generated paper exhibited good antibacterial and water vapor barrier performance. The obvious reactivity of our CUE-coated paper indicated the great possibility to design multi-functional paper packaging materials.
Highlights
Water vapor barrier property is of great importance for packaging materials
When the coating grammage was 0.97 g m−2, the surface morphology of the coated paper displayed no significant change in comparison with that of the unmodified paper, leading to the difficulty in the measurement of the coating thickness
Bekk smoothness of the coated paper increased, and fibrous structure on the coated papers gradually became invisible with obvious film formation as shown in their scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images
Summary
Water vapor barrier property is of great importance for packaging materials. The ubiquitous plastic packaging materials have excellent moisture barrier performance, they result in environmental, energy and health problems [3,4]. In this case, paper packaging materials have emerged due to their biodegradability, recyclability, renewability, flexibility, low cost, lightweight, good mechanical strength, and printability [5,6]. The quality of packed goods as well as the mechanical property of paper would be affected [7,8,9]. There is a need to enhance the paper water vapor barrier function for packaging applications
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