Modeling of oxygen scavenging for improved barrier behavior: Blend films

Design formulae for reactive barrier membranes

“…The limits of validity for the intermediate times based on the moving reaction front are wide enough that the equations developed can be confidently used in the range of interest for packaging applications (Ferrari et al, 2009). Furthermore, the validity of the analytical estimates can be predicted by calculatingt onset andt SF , which are functions of the dimensionless parametersL and n, respectively.…”

“…Numerical solutions were calculated for 0.0025ono1 and 2 oL o 80. The range of dimensionless parameters n andL were selected based on expected oxidation rates of polybutadiene embedded in polystyrene or poly(ethylene terephthalate) matrices (Ferrari et al, 2009), along with more extreme values of n (0.1 and 1) to represent limits of very low reactive capacity. In the next section we will show some typical numerical results.…”

“…Solovyov and Goldman (2005c) looked at non-zero initial oxygen concentration and other variations of the reactive membrane model. More recently, the time lag has been derived for reactive polymer blends (Ferrari et al, 2009). Following Siegel and Cussler (2004), the method to estimate time lag first combines both the mobile species and reactive sites concentration equations to give…”

“…However, time lag does not predict how much solute (e.g., oxygen or water) will permeate for times before the time lag. While time lag is an important figure of merit, the need to understand the flux prior to time lag has been recognized and some recent work has focused on studying the transient behavior of reactive membranes (Ferrari et al, 2009;Nuxoll and Cussler, 2005;Solovyov and Goldman, 2005a, b, c). Analytical estimates for transient behavior for homogeneous reactive films are currently limited to correlations and narrow ranges of applicability Solovyov and Goldman, 2005b).…”

Analytic formulae for the design of reactive polymer blend barrier materials

“…However, scavenging polymers typically lack adequate structural properties so they are usually employed as composites with polymers such as poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) and polystyrene (PS). Polymer blends [11] and multilayer composites [12][13][14][15][16][17] are two possible configurations of interest. Single layer reactive membranes have been modeled as homogeneous systems [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25], including the case of reactive particles uniformly dispersed in an inert media.…”