Thermal buffering effect of a packaging design with microencapsulated phase change material

Abstract

Summary Temperature fluctuations during storage and transportation are the most important factors affecting quality and shelf life of food products. Phase change materials (PCM) with their isothermal characteristics are used to control temperature in various thermal operations. In this study, octanoic acid as PCM candidate was used in a packaging material design for thermal control of a food product. The PCM candidate was microencapsulated in different shell materials in our laboratory. Among the synthesized microcapsules, microencapsulated PCM (mPCM) (ΔHm = 42.9 J/g) with styrene polymer as the shell material was selected based on its properties of being cost effective and compatibility with human health. Thermal buffering effect of PCM in bulk and microencapsulated forms was tested in a packaging design with special PCM pockets. Results showed that packages with mPCM and bulk PCM provided 8.8 and 6 hours of thermal buffering effect for 160 g of chocolate compared with the package without PCM (reference package).

Antimicrobial functionalization of Ca alginate‐coconut oil latent heat storing microcapsules by Ag nanoparticles

“…The common PCM entrapment strategies using durable but non‐recyclable and non‐degradable polymers require waste processing at additional cost after use 13 . In the food or pharmaceutical thermal control processes, the use of biocompatible materials takes important role, for example, Unal et al 14 entrapped octanoic acid PCM by polystyrene to thermally control food products. According to the author's aim, the polystyrene was chosen because of its human compatible nature.…”

Innovations in Smart Packaging Concepts for Food: An Extensive Review

“…Generally, encapsulation techniques could be divided into three categories: chemical methodologies that include suspension polymerization [156], emulsion polymerization [157], in situ and interfacial polymerization [158,159]; physico-chemical methodologies, as coacervation [160], sol-gel encapsulation [161], supercritical CO 2 -assisted [162]; and physico-mechanical methodologies, like spray drying [163], electrospinning [158] and vacuum impregnation [164]. PCMs are a really interesting class of compounds to be integrated into the primary food packaging, but to date the applications in this sense are still few [132,165,166] compared to applications in refrigerated containers [145,149,151,[167][168][169] or in the, already mentioned, construction and textile fields.…”

Review on Thermal Energy Storing Phase Change Material-Polymer Composites in Packaging Applications

“…This confirmed the superiority of PCMs over insulation material in temperature-controlled packaging systems. In another study, octanoic acid was microencapsulated in the polystyrene shell and incorporated in chocolate shipper walls [13]. It maintained the desired temperature for 6-8.8 h. Yie et al [14] prepared a silica aerogel-PCM composite structure.…”