Conceptual Approach to Renewable Barrier Film Design Based on Wood Hydrolysate

Biomass is converted to oxygen barriers through a conceptually unconventional approach involving the preservation of the biomass native interactions and macromolecular components and enhancing the effect by created interactions with a co-component. A combined calculation/assessment model is elaborated to understand, quantify, and predict which compositions that provide an intermolecular affinity high enough to mediate the molecular packing needed to create a functioning barrier. The biomass used is a wood hydrolysate, a polysaccharide-rich but not highly refined mixture where a fair amount of the native intermolecular and intramolecular hemicelluloses-lignin interactions are purposely preserved, resulting in barriers with very low oxygen permeabilities (OP) both at 50 and 80% relative humidity and considerably lower OPs than coatings based on the corresponding highly purified spruce hemicellulose, O-acetyl galactoglucomannan (AcGGM). The component interactions and mutual affinities effectively mediate an immobilization of the chain segments in a dense disordered structure, modeled through the Hansen's solubility parameter concept and quantified on the nanolength scale by positron annihilation lifetime spectrum (PALS).