Estudo sobre eletrofiação de quitosana

Abstract

Nowadays many kinds of polymers are being used in innumerable applications areas, such as pharmaceutical, food industry, filtration membranes, water treatment, tissue engineering, fuel cells, and others. Recently, it has been observed a great necessity to use biodegradable polymers, because they presents the advantage of undergoing an accelerated degradation. The source of biodegradable polymers can be natural or synthetic, which is important the natural polymers present similar properties, compared to the synthetics, used in large scale. Chitosan is a second natural polymer most abundant in nature, therefore it is broadly studied, in order to replace some synthetic polymer. Many studies indicate that the chitosan can be processed in the shape of films, particles, membranes, fibers, and others. Thus, one way of to obtain polymeric fibers is using the electrospinning technique, which consists in a relatively simple and inexpensive process. In this technique, it can obtain fibers exhibiting diameters in the range of nanometric to micrometric scale, with high surface area. Thus, in this work, it was studied the chitosan solubility, in different acid solvents at different concentrations, aiming to obtain the electrospun chitosan fibers.