Characterization of the rheology of polymer/bioactive glass solutions and fabrication of nanocomposite materials

Nanotechnology is used in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, electronics, computers, materials, textiles and medicine, as well as in food and agriculture. In nanotechnological studies, nanofibers are defined as structures with diameters below 100 nanometers. Nanofibers can be produced by different methods and among these methods, electrospinning is the most common production technique. Nanofibers, which are produced by this technique, are widely used in applications such as food and tissue engineering. Synthetic and natural biopolymers are commonly used in the fabrication of nanofibers. The aim of this study is to produce polymer/glass nanocomposite material which can be used in different fields such as tissue engineering or food engineering by using electrospinning method. For this purpose, rheological characterization of the polymer solutions has been performed at the first stage. The effects of acetic acid and formic acid concentrations on rheological properties of gelatin/ polycaprolactone (PCL) solution and the effect of alginate concentration on rheological properties of gelatin/PCL/alginate solution were investigated. Furthermore, the rheological properties of the gelatin /PCL and gelatin/PCL/alginate solution with the addition of bioactive glass were studied. Gelatin/PCL, gelatin/ PCL/alginate solutions and the bioactive glass doped gelatin/ PCL and gelatin/ PCL/alginate solutions were resulted to be Newtonian type fluids. After the reological characterization of the solutions, nano-composite materials were fabricated by electrospinning method and the morphology of the obtained materials was investigated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). It was resulted that the gelatin/PCL nanocomposite, which was formed by using 100% formic acid without bioactive glass, is favorable to be used as a food packaging material. Accordingly, the average diameter of selected nanofiber is 315 nm. Bioactive glass doped nano-materials can be good candidates for bone tissue engineering applications. For this purpose, gelatin/PCL nanofiber containing 5% bioactive glass by weight was chosen. The average diameter of the selected nanofiber is 480 nm. As a result of this study, the produced nanofibers can be used in both bone tissue engineering and food engineering applications