Studies of Absorption in Sanitary Protective Gloves

摘要

In this article, we calculated the mass saturation and the diffusion coefficient of the polymeric systems used in protective gloves for distilled water and artificial sweat. It can be seen that the absorption is greater when the gloves are immersed in distilled water, particularly for nitrile and neoprene gloves. This happens because the crystals formed with artificial sweat are positioned on the surface of the glove's pores to partly prevent liquid absorption. A differential scanning calorimeter was used to determine the glass transition temperature for amorphous polymer, nitrile gloves, vinyl gloves, exploration latex gloves and surgical latex gloves, and the melting temperature for semi-crystalline neoprene gloves. The plasticizing results obtained for immersion of distilled water were similar to those of immersion in artificial sweat. UV-visible spectrometry can be applied to an indirect technique to test the glove's permeability. The results show that in the case of the nitrile, vinyl, exploration latex, and surgical latex, a migration of the indicator through the glove takes place. In contrast, no migration happens in the case of the neoprene. In nitrile gloves and vinyl gloves, a greater migration is observed. This could indicate a greater permeability of this type of glove. In the case of surgical latex and exploration latex, a migration with a relatively small value is observed. Using a scanning electron microscope (SEM), we observed the structural modifications that polymers undergo during their exposure to artificial sweat. The surgical latex immersed in artificial sweat shows the size increase in the pores, while the corresponding nitrile gloves do not vary. This fact could be related to the results obtained in the study of absorption that showed that surgical latex gloves had greater plasticizing.