Design and development of polysaccharide based biodegradable material for tailor made applications

Abstract

Value addition is the central premise of any RandD work. In this dissertation the results of the RandD efforts for value adding polysaccharides derived from different sources have been described. In addition, these polysaccharides based new materials with different functional properties have been synthesized and studied. From this study, it is concluded that chemically cross linked derivatives of polysaccharides with special reference to the sodium alginate, guar gum, chitosan and xanthan gum produced derivatives with different functional properties. Further the functional modification of sodium alginate inducing certain additional properties to the polysaccharide. The synthesized conjugates exhibited properties such as a rapid dissolving film as a drug delivery system, hydrophobic membrane, films with enhanced mechanical properties making them suitable for a wide range of applications from food packaging to biomedical devices, hydrophobic conjugate demonstrating stability and robust hydrophobicity, expanding the potential for its use in fields such as tissue engineering. The conjugates were characterized using various analytical tools i.e. FT-IR, XRD, SEM, TGA, DSC. newline newline