Thermal, chemical, biological and mechanical properties of chitosan films with powder of eggshell membrane for biomedical applications

The objective of this work was to develop chitosan films incorporated with the eggshell membrane powder (MCO) by the solvent evaporation method with application perspective as curatives. Chitosan was obtained from the deacetylation of chitin extracted from shrimp shells of Litopenaeus vannamei Boone , and the membranes were manually extracted from chicken eggshells, dehydrated in an oven at 60 °C for 2 days, crushed and passed through a 325 mesh to obtain the powder. Then, the solution of 1% (w v −1 ) chitosan in 0.1 mol L −1 lactic acid was prepared, in which the membrane powder was dissolved, obtaining films with percentages of 10, 20 and 30% of MCO (w w −1 ). For this, the mixture was stirred under mechanical stirring at 600 rpm for 24 h, poured into Petri dishes and oven-dried at 40 °C for 24 h. The chitosan powder was characterized as to the degree of deacetylation and viscosimetric molar mass and the MCO was characterized as to its constituents. In turn, the films were characterized by TG, DSC, DRX, FTIR, surface tension, water vapor permeability, tensile test and cytotoxicity. Based on the results, it can be concluded that, due to the thermal, physical, chemical and mechanical stability of the films, the addition of chitosan matrix loading caused instability of the material; however, the composition with 10% presented higher properties, showing better stability. The materials presented potentiality, due to being biocompatible, biodegradable, low cost, and also contributing to reduce environmental pollution.