Intelligent Food Package Developed Via Electrospinning

Electrospun nanofibers have special structures which give them unique properties. Such properties make them useful in many fields and have a broad application prospect, leading to worldwide attention. Electrospinning nanofibers had penetrated into various fields, including:bio-medicine, filtering, energy, sensors, clothing materials. However, there were few paper reported in food industry. The researches about developing and improving food packaging has been the focus in the food industry for long time. In recent years, smart packages have been attracting researchers worldwide attention because of its great potential value. Combined with current research on smart packaging, instructions for preparing Oxygen Indicator nanofibers and Time-temperature Indicator nanofibers were developed via electrospining, having ability of indicating the integrality of vacuum packaging, modified atmosphere packaging, and indicating the temperature history of packaging food during the food distribution chain in order to insure the food quality and safety was up to standard, respectivly. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X- ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) techniques resulting electrospun fiber membrane characterized for characterize the intelligent food packaging materials.The main results:1. Methylene blue (MB of), glycerin (Glycerol), titanium oxide were mixed with 10% (wt) of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) aqueous solution,12%(wt) polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) aqueous solution separately, prepared a PVA oxygen indicator film and PVP oxygen indicator film via electrospinning. Compaired two type of oxygen indicator film on the function of indicate oxygen, using various means of characterization studies on the films for exploring the mechanism. Compared to previous studies, PVA oxygen indicator nanofibers has greatly improved in response time, can clearly indicate the presence of oxygen in only 180 seconds. Due to a good ability of water-soluble, PVP oxygen indicator nanofibers was easy to become damp in the air and its nanostructures was partially destroyed, so it takes longer time to indicate the presence of oxygen, required for at least 1 hour. And the two oxygen indicator film can be reused.2.10,12 pentacosane diacetylene acid (PCDA) and chitosan(CS) were selected as the materials to develop layer-by-layer composite nanofibers. They were alternately deposited to the surface of acetic acid cellulose (CA) nanofiber film through lectrostatic interactions as the main driving force. SEM, FTIR, XRD and other means were used to characterize this composite fiber membrane; composite nanofibers are sensitive to temperature, changing as time goes by, color changes at different temperatures, which can be used as Time-temperature indication packaging in potential. In addition, the characteristics of the composite nanofibers to detect heavy metal ions were studied. The results show that the composite nanofibers for capacity Mg2+, Pb2+ and other metal ions having a qualitative detection, in the case of UV radiation excitation will display different colors, thereby achieve qualitative and quantitative coarse features, and color effects can be distinguished by the naked eye.