Chemical modification of pectin: environmental friendly process for new potential material development

Chemical modification of pectin was successfully accomplished as a solvent free process. It involved acylation of alcoholic functions of the polysaccharide by using several fatty acid anhydrides. The reaction was performed by simply mixing the reagents with a catalytic amount of the inorganic base potassium carbonate and heating the obtained mixture at a temperature of 160 °C. The desired esters were fully characterized by NMR and FT-IR spectroscopy.