Síntese, caracterização e avaliação biológica de filmes à base de PCL/ZNO para aplicação em embalagens de alimentos.

Abstract

Global world packaging market grows constantly trying to fill the society needs. Innovations offering solutions for the industrial packaging segment are needed, and current trends suggest functional packages’ development containing antimicrobial agents able to avoid or even to kill pathogenic microorganisms, parallelally being environmentally friendly packaging, providing lower environmental damages. Development of iodegradable films with active substances is interesting for the food industry. Due to its ductile character, polycaprolactone (PCL), biodegradable polyester with proper mechanical and degradation kinetic properties when disposed to the environment, presenting relatively satisfactory processing costs among aliphatic polyesters has great potential use for the biodegradable food packaging. In this work nanostructured zinc oxide (ZnOnano) was added to PCL matrix, neat PCL films and ZnOnano films with 5, 10 and 15 % were successfully produced by Solvent Casting. Films were characterized by Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Optical Microscopy (MO) and Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), additionally antimicrobial activity and cytotoxicity were also performed. Main results showed the chemical identity of individual components was not modified; the surface control could be achieved changing composition. At 5% of ZnO, this filler is well distributed along PCL matrix, presenting uniform surface. Pathogenic bacterial growth was inhibited throughout PCL film specifically for films with 5% ZnOnano. Optimum antibacterial efficacy and absent toxicity were obtained. PCL films with homogeneously dispersed ZnO nanoparticles along with the matrix offer great potential to be commercially applied being interesting films for the food packaging industry.