fairfolio
Saved Projects

From Food Waste to Food Guard: Creating a Novel Chitosan Bioplastic with Nanoparticle Coating, and Its Unique Effect on Water Resistance and Food Preservation

CSEF · 2023 Environmental Engineering Fourth Award

Yao Henry · 11

Overview

Plastics, despite their benefits in transforming our lives in multiple aspects, have caused serious white pollution. The objective of this project is to create low-cost, sustainable chitosan bioplastic, explore its unique antimicrobial application in food preservation, and design a novel approach to solve water permeability challenge facing most bioplastics. Chitosan, the second most abundant polymer made from shells of shellfish, is selected as base material. Development process includes heating, molding, drying/cooling to create chitosan bioplastics. Second, to solve water permeability challenge, silicon dioxide nanoparticle coating is created to apply to chitosan biofilms using Langmuir-Blodgett technique, which improves its water-resistance by raising water contact angles from 50-60 to 115-degrees. Third, both chitosan and NP-coated chitosan biofilms are evaluated against conventional plastics on tensile strength, water permeability, water/soil degradability, and phytotoxicity. Results showed that both biofilms can sustain similar tensile strength, but possess distinctive environmental advantages in hydrolysis under a week and soil degradation within four weeks, with no phytotoxcity impact to plant growth. Lastly, to explore chitosan’s antimicrobial application, repeated tests discovered that chitosan biofilms can prolong perishable fruits’ shelf-life by five times compared with conventional plastics, generating unique economic values in food preservation. Chitosan bioplastic created from this project has proved to be a next-gen low-cost and eco-friendly alternative to conventional plastics. In addition, the unique antimicrobial application in food preservation and significant improvement in water resistance through nanoparticle coating can bring additional economic benefits, making chitosan bioplastic a unique and highly viable bioplastic for food packaging/preservation industry and beyond.

Source coverage

This record comes from a published award list, not a complete project archive. Its abstract comes from CSEF's public project showcase as archived by the Internet Archive before judging (https://web.archive.org/web/20230401224130/https://ca-csef.zfairs.com/showcase/ShowcaseInfo?f=838e60b7-ea75-46e8-865c-fde4864244b3); the version presented may differ.

Awards (1)

Competition history

  • CSEF 2023 Environmental Engineering · Entry S1125

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google