Nanocompounds as Formulating Aids

Abstract

Nanotechnology involves the characterization, fabrication, and/or manipulation of structures, devices,or materials that have, or at least, contain components with at least one dimension that is approximately 1–100 nm long. When particle size is reduced below this threshold, the resulting material exhibits physical and chemical properties that are significantly different from the properties of macroscale materials composed of the same substances.Undeniably, the most active area of food nanoscience research and development is packaging, where significant advances in the nanoreinforcement of biobased materials provide a more solid ground toward increasing the technical and economic competitiveness of renewable polymers for different applications.Because of their size, the nanoreinforcements have a high aspect ratio that involves a relative larger surface area per mass of filler than the microreinforcements, which causes a strong interaction with the polymer matrix. As a result, it is expected that the resulting materials could exhibit better mechanical and barrier properties, thermal stability, chemical resistance, and surface appearance. Interestingly,these improvements can be achieved with low loading levels (≤ 5%–10%), while traditional compounds need higher filler contents (40%–50%) to achieve the same reinforcement effect. This phenomenon leads to reductions in the weight for the same behavior—which is important for various applications—or increased resistance and better barrier properties to similar structural dimensions. These facts makethem very interesting to be used in packaging materials (Rhim et al., 2007; Zhao et al., 2008).This chapter resumes the recent advances in bionanocomposites and their preparation techniques,properties, and applications