Water Uptake Improvement in Hygiene Papers by NanoHydrogel Prepared from Chitosan/Nano silver/ PolyAcrylic Acid Composite

Superabsorbent hydrogel is a three-dimensional hydrophilic polymer that can absorb and store large amounts of water and aqueous solutions. Among various polymers, the chitosan as a biodegradable and non-toxic polymer has been widely used to fabricate superabsorbent hydrogels. In this research, a nanohydrogel composed of chitosan, acrylic acid and silver nanoparticles was synthesized by radical polymerization at 60 Co. Swelling properties of chitosan/nanosilver/acrylic acid hydrogel were studied and then this hydrogel was treated under  ultrasonication. Finally, this hydrogel was coated on paper samples with 0, 1, 1.5 and 2 w % of hydrogel. FTIR spectroscopy was used to determine the functional groups and dynamic light scattering method (DLS) was applied to identify the size of hydrogel’s nano and microparticles The images of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed a hydrogel coating on paper and water stress tests revealed that adding 0% to 1.5 w% of nanohydrogels to the paper surface increased its water absorption from 64.3% to 95.5%. Other worthwhile fact was that that the addition of silver nanoparticles effectively facilitated the formation of a three-dimensional hydrogel structure and increased the water swelling in nanohydrogel from 130 ± 10 g / g to 232 ± 7 g / g.