Currently, various plastic materials derived from petroleum are used as industrial products. Especially, plastic bottles have become one of the most familiar plastic products for us. Products which were sold in glass bottles and cans are sold in plastic bottles today. In the alcohol such as wine and beer, migration to plastic bottles is in progress by the increase in demand of improved impact resistance and weight reduction. On the other hand, petroleum-derived plastic materials have an issue of the progress of global warming caused by consumption of fossil resources as the raw materials and depletion of those resources. Under these circumstances, poly(lactic acid) (PLA), which can be synthesized from plants such as corn, has gotten the great attention. PLA is expected in the application for plastic bottles, and studies of important material properties such as transparency and gas barrier have been reported. On the other hand, other important property, permeability of an organic solvent such as ethanol, in applications plastic bottles for alcoholic drinks has not been reported. In this study, the permeability, solubility and diffusivity of ethanol/water mixtures through amorphous PLA were systematically investigated. Flux of water through PLA membrane showed almost constant value up to 30 wt% feed concentration, and decreased at 50 wt%. On the other hand, Flux of ethanol tended to increase with the increase of feed concentration. In addition, the Flux of water showed a high value of 10,000-fold compared to the Flux of ethanol. This result was due to the diffusion coefficient in PLA membrane. In addition, from the results of various measurements of physical properties of PLA membranes before and after permeation of ethanol/water mixtures, it became clear that the structure of PLA membrane did not change. Based on these results, we discussed about permeation mechanism in this study.

Permeation properties of ethanol solution through poly(lactic acid) membrane

248th National Meeting (2014)

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