Green processing of porous chitin structures for biomedical applications combining ionic liquids and supercritical fluid technology

摘要

The application of green chemistry principles in the processing of materials for advanced technologies is asteadily increasing field of research. In this work porous chitin-based materials were developed by combining the processing of chitin using ionic liquids (ILs)as a green solvent together with the use of super-critical fluid technology(SCF) as clean technology.Chitin was dissolved in 1-butyl-3-imidazoliumacetate,followed by regeneration of the polymer in ethanol in specific moulds.The IL was removed usingSoxhlet extraction and successive steps of extraction with SCF using carbon dioxide/ethanol ratios of 50/50 and70/30.The developed porous chitin-based structures (ChIL)can be classified as mesoporous materials,with very low density and high porosity.The cytotoxicity of ChIL extracts was investigated usingL929 fibroblast like cells,and the results demonstrated that the produced materials have extremelylowcytotoxicityl evels.Therefore,the findings suggest that the porous chitin structures may be potential candidates for a number of biomedical applications,including tissue engineering.