Enzymatic Polysaccharide-Based Aerogel Absorbents for Sustainable Personal Hygiene Applications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Polysaccharide-based aerogels have attracted attention as sustainable alternatives for absorbent products in personal hygiene. They present greener alternatives to the commonly used polyacrylates and meet the requirements of biodegradability, biocompatibility, and a more benign hazard potential. The polysaccharide utilized in this study is α-1,3-glucan produced via the enzymatic polymerization of glucose from sucrose. Here, we investigate cross-linking of the glucan with various inorganics to produce hybrid aerogels with three-dimensional (3D) interwoven microstructures, superior structural integrity, and fluid absorption capacity suitable for personal hygiene applications. We capitalize on the narrow solubility window of the glucan under alkaline conditions and prepare precursor hydrogels via a simple, acid-assisted precipitation method. The inclusion of inorganics (MgO, CaO, and TiO 2 ) during the neutralization step enhances the mechanical strength of the hybrid hydrogels which are converted subsequently to aerogels in a freeze-drying process. These hybrid aerogels, namely, TiO 2 /glucan, CaO/glucan, and MgO/glucan, display improved yield stress doubling that of the aerogel derived directly from glucan and higher absorption capacity toward deionized water in two different sorption experiments (with and without load). For commercially relevant hygiene applications, the absorption capacities of the aerogels toward model urine and menstrual fluids are assessed, and the absorption capacities of the TiO 2 /glucan hybrid aerogels are on par with commercial diapers and surpass sanitary pads due to the interplay of the glucan neutral charge and favorable hierarchical structure that enables effective uptake of the fluids. These findings indicate that the inorganic/glucan-based aerogels hold promise as viable sustainable alternatives to absorbents used in commercial hygiene applications such as sanitary pads and diapers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".