Abstract
The development of environmentally friendly materials has been the focus of many research groups in recent years due to increased harmful effects of plastics on the environment. Bio-based materials are considered a key solution from a sustainable manufacturing perspective. The nano-coating of biopolymer blends with silver nanoparticles is the subject of challenging research projects in line with the EU Directive on environment protection and sustainable manufacturing. Coating biopolymers with silver nanoparticles provides an antimicrobial and antiviral active surface. In this work, we develop silver nanoparticle-coated biopolymer Arboblend V2 Nature pellets. The main goal is to obtain a new material with antibacterial action obtained from the blending of a biopolymer pellets with silver nanoparticles through physical vapor deposition. The study is divided in three steps. The first step represents the silver nano-coating of the Arboblend V2 Nature and the characterization of the coated/raw pellets. The second step involves the injection molding of the silver nano-coated pellets and the characterization of the samples obtained. The last step regards the press molding of the coated pellets in order to obtain thin films, as well as their characterization. The PVD-sputtering technique is used to coat the pellets with silver nanoparticles. This process is especially optimized for coating raw materials with high water content and small-size pellets. The mechanical properties, surface chemical composition and the thermal properties of the both virgin and silver nanoparticle-coated biopolymer pellets are measured and analyzed for mechanical and thermal resistance of the nano-coating layer. Differential scanning calorimetry, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray photoemission spectroscopy and nanoindentation mechanical testing is performed. The calorimetry test detects no significant alteration of the biopolymer produced from the PVD process and confirms the optimized PVD process for nano-coating of the Arboblend V2 Nature pellets with a viable application in nano-silver–biopolymer composite products.
Highlights
Developing green composites from regenerative resources has attracted the attention of many researchers worldwide as a solution for the creation of sustainable and environmentally friendly materials [1,2]
Biopolymer-based Arboblend V2 Nature pellets were silver nanoparticles coated with the physical vapor deposition sputtering deposition process
This research project consists of two main phases: the first step was to coat the Arboblend V2 Nature pellets and characterize these pellets relative to the virgin pellets, and the second phase of characterizing parts produced with these materials via injection molding is still in progress
Summary
Developing green composites from regenerative resources has attracted the attention of many researchers worldwide as a solution for the creation of sustainable and environmentally friendly materials [1,2]. Biopolymers such as Arbofill, Arboblend and Arboform were developed for green composite applications. Beisl et al reported that up to 100 million tons of lignin are produced each year and this is sharply increasing every year [5] This material has a number of useful properties for high-value applications, including its chemical robustness to UV and biological environment exposure and physical stiffness [6]. As reported in [9], Arboblend V2 Nature is supplied in pellet form for usage within the polymer molding processes [10,11,12] This alternative, competes with other composite materials, such as Arbofill Fitche and Arboform LV3 Nature. We reported several analyses of raw materials with biodegradable capacity for additive manufacturing [14]
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