The Creation of Composite Materials and Gels on the Base of Arabinogalactan

Abstract

Natural polysaccharide arabinogalactan (AG), contained in Siberian larch in the form of aqua-complex in a liquid state, plays the role of a eutectic plasticizer over a wide temperature range, due to which larch survives at low temperatures. At present time AG is used in different fields including food industry, veterinary, medicine at al. One of the promising areas of its application is also the creation of biodegradable polymer composites with synthetic and nature polymers. Compositions of AG with polymers of different classes (low-density polyethelene and biodegradable polyester polylactide) were obtained in the solid state under conditions of shear deformations and their mechanical characteristics were measured. It was shown that PLA-based materials are more rigid and have lower elongation at break than LDPE-AG composites. Hydrogels based on AG crosslinked by ethylene glycol diglycidyl ether and glutaric aldehyde were also obtained. The study of their behavior suggested that the use of AG in the form of concentrated solutions with low viscosity is more preferable.