Feasibility of poly-vinyl alcohol/starch/glycerol/citric acid composite films for wound dressing applications

This work addresses the competence of PVA/starch/citric acid (PVA/St/CA) based composite films for wound dressing applications. Literature reported composition of PVA, starch and glycerol were adopted and the optimality of crosslinking temperature (40 to 60 °C) and citric acid concentration (0.5 to 3 g) have been investigated during solution casting based composite film fabrication. The prepared polymer films have been characterized with swelling index, solubility based biodegradability, gel fraction, mechanical strength, water vapor transmission rate and antimicrobial effectiveness. The optimized film (composition) were analyzed to possess excellent swelling (260.5 ± 2.9%) and in-vitro degradation (45.5 ± 1.8-59.8 ± 0.4% degradation, during 14 days) characteristics. Further, the film possesses enhanced combinations of water vapor transmission rate and antibacterial activity with Gram-negative (Escherichia coli) and Gram-positive (Listeria monocytogenes) bacteria. With all these promising characteristics, the low temperature (50 °C) and long duration (12 h) fabricated PVA-St-CA films have been inferred to be a potential candidate for wound dressing applications.