Equilibrium Moisture Content of Some Bioplastic Materials for Agricultural Use

Abstract

This work focused on the determination of equilibrium moisture content (EMC) of some bioplastic materials that could be used for agricultural foil mulch. Equilibrium moisture content (EMC) is very important to determine the desirable conditions of microorganism’s growth, which causes material deterioration and degradation. Thus, this work aimed to determine the EMC of some commercial bioplastic mulch such as (Bioflex, Ecoflex, Chitosan, Mater-bi, and Bi-OPL). The bioplastic materials were put under different temperature (10-50°C) and relative humidity (43-95%) Conditions. The results indicated that the EMC of all materials increased while increasing the relative humidity, but decreased with increasing temperature. But the relative humidity has a greater effect on the change of moisture content (MC) than the effect of temperature. The data revealed that both of Mater-Bi and Chitosan has a great effect by changing the relative humidity from 43 to 95%, which increased the EMC by 9.87 and 12.22%, respectively. On the other hand, there is a small effect on the EMC with relative humidity changes on each of Ecoflex (1.41%), Bioflex (2.4%) and Bi-OPL (0.5%).