Synthesis and Characterization of Barley Starch-g-Polyacrylamide with Zinc Sulphate (ZnSO4) Metal Salt

Abstract

There has been extensive interest from researchers in utilizing the natural biopolymer as a reinforcement material in thermoplastic composite. Growing research has been carried out on natural biopolymer reinforcement thermoplastic composites due to their low processing cost. Starch, a natural carbohydrate biopolymer due to its biodegradability and versatility, has become a subject of industrial and academic studies for many decades. Grafting of starch on various monomers increased the hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity. High viscosity, thermal stability, biodegradability, good film-forming properties, and water absorption capacity are some properties shown by the graft co-polymerization of starch. The present work was conducted to synthesize the barley starch-g-polyacrylamide-based composite material. In this research the effect of different weight percentages of metal (?10%) on different properties of starch-g- polyacrylamide (20% and 80%) composite was studied. The analytical techniques including Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (X-ray), and scanning electron microscope (SEM) were used for the characterization of composite material. The composition of the synthesized composite was assessed by FTIR which confirms
the functionalization of the prepared composite and there is a strong interaction between composite and metal due to coordinate covalent bonds. XRD defines the crystalline structure of the composite the morphological changes were studied by SEM.