STUDY OF CHITOSAN MICROCAPSULES DEGRADATION WITH APPLICATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW MEDICAL TEXTILES

Chitosan is a polysaccharide derived from chitin; chitin is the second most abundant polysaccharide in the world, after cellulose. Several remarkable properties of chitosan offered unique opportunities to the development of biomedical and agriculture applications. In addition, chitosan allows obtaining microcapsules with diferrent functionalities according to the core material, but his characteristic allows achieving a control release of the active material. Chitosan microcapsules can be obtained by different encapsulation methods; in this case the extrusion-gelling method has been selected and two kinds of nozzles have been used. The simple nozzle produce a matrix, it can be described as a solid polymer system in which the core material is distributed more or less uniformly throughout the polymer matrix. The concentric nozzle is a standard nozzle configuration to produce core-shell capsules. This study analyses the biodregradability of chitosan microcapsules obtained by co-extrusion/gelling using a single and concentric nozzle, with the aim of defining possible applications in the field of medical textiles.So the weight loss (%) has been calculated in different times, in order to compare the weight loss (%) in each type of microcapsules. The difference in degradation time is due to the quantity of chitosan in the microcapsules. The microcapsules obtained by simple coextrusion contain a greater quantity of polymer than those obtained by concentric extrusion