Grafting of methyl methacrylate onto natural keratin

Abstract

Keratin fibers from chicken feathers were modified through graft copolymerization with methyl methacrylate in an aqueous medium, using a KMnO 4 / malic acid redox system. Original and grafted fibers were characterized by IR and Raman spectroscopy and their thermal behavior was studied by both differential scanning calorimetry and thermogravimetric analysis. The grafted fiber surface was characterized by scanning electron microscopy. The characterization results show that grafting was effectively achieved and this was confirmed by a ninhydrin test after acidic hydrolysis of the grafted keratin.

All Green Composites from Fully Renewable Biopolymers: Chitosan-Starch Reinforced with Keratin from Feathers

“…In the same Figure 19B, the main bands related to keratin are also observed, the band at 1630 cm is related to bending of the CH 3 group [1,17,19]. It is possible to observe that these peaks are found in the composite films, but only slight changes are found in the ground quill composite.…”

“…During the last decade, an increasing amount of research has been published involving keratin fibers from chicken feather with synthetic polymers, such as grafting with polymethylmethacrylate [19,20] and polyhydroxyethylmethacrylate [21]; composites with polyethylene [22,23], polypropylene [24][25][26], polymethylmethacrylate [27], polyurethane [28] and phenol-formaldehyde [29], among others [18], however there are only few related to keratin fibers and biopolymers [30,31].…”

Evaluation of Graft Copolymerization of Acrylic Monomers Onto Natural Polymers by Means Infrared Spectroscopy

“…Grafted polymer percentage was determinate according with next formulae (Martínez-Hernández et al, 2003;Gupta and Sahoo, 2001):…”

“…This spectroscopy may used to identify the composition of polymers, to monitor polymerization processes, to characterize polymer structure, to examine polymer surface, and to investigate polymer degradation processes. There are several reports of use of IR spectroscopy to evaluate grafting of acrylic monomers onto natural materials as carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) and chicken feathers (CF) (Martínez et al, 2003, Vasile et al, 2004, Zohuriann-Mehr et al, 2005, Joshi and Sinha, 2006.…”

“…Modification of natural protein through grafting have become in a widely used path and some works have carry out studies with acrylic monomers as ethylacrylate, acrylic acid, methacrylic acid and methyl methacrylate (Mostafa, 1995;Athawale and Rathi, 1997;Jia and Yong, 2006;Zampano, et al 2009), which carried out graft of natural fibers and proteins. However, just few of works report grafting of hydroxyethyl methacrylate onto naturals fibers (Joshi and Sinha, 2006) (Martínez et al, 2003.…”