The Preparation And Characterization Of Artificial Sausage Casing

As we known, leather industry is a high devotion/ consume and low output traditional one, and about 30% raw material become into split leather with low quality, high cost, serious environmental pollution, which results in low benefit in whole trade. How to use the split leather and leather waste effectively/ enhance their value/ reduce the environmental pollution is very important in the reality. Exploring the artificial sausage casing is one of the ways to realize. It has a vast market foreground for its lower cost/ simple preparation technics/ no pollution during produce/ products for green. Large molecules of collagen are studied with FT-IR/ HPLC/ SDS-PAGE gel electrophoresis/ DSC etc analysis and testing instrumentality. The results show that pepsin is a better collagen enzyme, and the hydrolyzed collagen can keep integrityαhelix structure. The hydrolyzed extent of collagen and the range of molecule weight can be controlled through the reaction time of enzyme and collagen. The best process condition of pepsin is at pH 2.5-3 and 4℃ for 48 hours. Moreover, the results of HPLC indicate that above 60% of collagen are α peptide and about 20% are β peptide. At the same time, the simple and feasible technics supply a foundational technique for more exploitation and utilization. From the forward chapter, we have known that the physical characteristics of the film made of pure collagen cannot reach the demand by sausage casing, so modification must be required. Blending with other edible things was chosen as the way of modification for the edibility. The results prove that collagen/ chitin and PVA are miscible for the better optical transmittance capacity than chitin film. On the other hand, the breaking extension increase and the tensile strength decrease with the collagen added. Exception this, the increasing ratio of area and water absorption and water keeping of blending films increase with the content of collagen and PVA. At the same time, preparation temperature is important, and the dissolve and expanding capability of the films are best when it at 40℃.Through the mechanism capability of film has been improved a lot after modified, the film component of hydrolyzed collagen can not meet the requirement by the sausage casing, so the collagen fibrils from the split leather are used as the material of casing and blended with CMC/ modified corn starch/ polyethylene glycol etc edible substance. The results of industrialization experiments show that we can gain the needed effect when the content of glutaraldehyde as the cross-linking reagent is 0.2%. The tensile strength and water absorption capacity will increase suddenly if the content of it is below 0.2%. But the tensile strength and water absorption capacity do little change when above 0.2%. The plasticizer is important for the mechanism capability of artificial collagen casing, but the content of it cannot be above 25%, and the neutralization treatment is necessary for the products. The collagen sausage casings have met the demand by the produce after optimized the prescription and technics.