Modeling of the reticulation kinetics of alginate/pluronic blends for biomedical applications

In this work, blends of alginate/pluronic (F127) for biomedical applications were investigated. In particular, the kinetics of alginate chain reticulation by bivalent cations was studied by experimental and modeling approaches. Two kinds of sodium alginate were tested to obtain hard gel films. The thicknesses of the reticulated alginate films were measured as function of the exposure time and of the reticulating copper (Cu2+) solution concentration. The kinetics was described by a proper model able to reproduce the experimental data. The model parameters, evaluated based on the measurements of thicknesses as function of Cu2+ concentration and exposure time, were further validated by comparing the prediction of the model with another set of independent measurement; here, the depletion of Cu2+ ions in the conditioning solution above the reacting gel is measured as function of time. The tuned model could be used in the description of the future applications of the blends. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.