Abstract
In a previous work, we have shown that chitosan true physical gelation occurs in some organic and inorganic acids (Hamdine et al. 2004). Two systems presenting similar gelation mechanisms were characterized furthermore in order to investigate the sol–gel transition: the chitosan–phosphoric acid and the chitosan–oxalic acid systems. By performing rheological measurements in the framework of linear viscoelasticity, we have investigated the effect of time, temperature, and polymer concentration on the gelation evolution. For both acid-based systems, gelation occurred above a critical polymer concentration around 5% w/v (g/100 ml) of chitosan. Isothermal time sweep experiments showed that the gelation occurs in three stages: (i) incubation; (ii) rapid increase of G′; and (iii) a last stage where G′ slowly reached its equilibrium value due to slow molecular diffusion. At the gel point, G′ and G′′ scaled with ωn, with n=0.55 for both acid-based systems and a fractal dimension d f of 1.9. Cooling–heating cycles revealed that the gels showed thermoreversibility after one sequence, but became permanent during subsequent cycles.
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Conseil de Recherches en Pêche et en Agroalimentaire du Québec (CORPAQ). They would also like to thank Karine Gerdaoui for providing the chitosan–oxalic acid kinetics data. Finally, the comments from the reviewers and the editor were greatly appreciated.
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Hamdine, M., Heuzey, MC. & Bégin, A. Viscoelastic properties of phosphoric and oxalic acid-based chitosan hydrogels. Rheol Acta 45, 659–675 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00397-005-0024-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00397-005-0024-8