New blends of acrylamide/chitosan and potato peel waste as improved water absorbing polymers for diaper applications

Valorization of environmental wastes into beneficial products is a global direction that is recently adopted. Potato peels are one of these wastes that are daily released to the environment in tremendous amounts. The current research is concerning by the extraction of starch polymer from potato peels waste and depending on its water uptake capacity to be used as a blending material in the currently applied diapers. Starch has been blended in different percentages with poly acrylamide (PAAM) and chitosan (CTS) polymers to increase their overall water capacity. The blended polymers were characterized by Fourier-transform infrared and Raman spectroscopy which confirmed the corresponding interaction among the three polymers depending on the detected functional groups. The thermal gravimetric analysis showed that the addition of starch to PAAM-CTS membrane increased the thermal stability and reduces the weight loss from 53.86% to 7.9%. The results of surface roughness were increased from 0.19 to 0.28 μm after the addition of starch which were highly matched with SEM images and suggesting the increasing of the swelling kinetics of the prepared membranes. Moreover, water uptake test as a physicochemical characterization revealed that the swelling ratio of PAAM-CTS membrane was around 48% which has been elevated to 92% after starch amendment. These results indicate that the addition of starch to polyacrylamide and chitosan blend can approximately duplicate their water-holding capacity which can repurpose it it to be widely applied in diapers applications.