Design av fuktokänsliga biobaserade syrgasbarriärer genom att systemtiskt korrelera biopolymernas molekylstrukturna till barriärfunktionen

“The total Swedish export income from packaging and forest-based products is more than 11%. Our forest is arenewable resource that can be used to produce and develop more sustainable packaging materials withdecreased climate stress compared to today’s fossil ones or aluminum foil. But, the replacement of fossil basedmaterials with bio-based counterparts is hampered by the change of functionalities occurring upon exposure tomoisture. Available models for predicting these changes are inadequate. This PhD project aims to use my newmodel to predict water- cellulose derivative (CD) interactions (based on Hansen solubility parameters butextended to also include molecular structure information of the CDs) and relate it to the performance of CDbarriers in the presence of moisture. Methyl-, ethyl-, hydroxypropyl-cellulose and cellulose acetate will be usedas CDs. Their molecular weights, degrees of substitution and distributions of substituents will be characterizedand used as structure descriptors. The gas permeabilities, free volumes and glass transition temperatures forbarriers exposed to different relative humidities will be determined as the performance parameters.Relationships correlating the molecular structure to the performance of the bio-barriers will be established. This,and the strong involvement by industrial stakeholders, will speed up the development of more robust andmoisture insensitive bio-barriers and the transformation to a more sustainable society.”