Antimicrobial studies of nanocomposite films containing Ag, ZnO and CuO nanoparticles for food packaging

Nowadays, a lot of measures were taken to prevent thermal damages in order to maintain the quality of foodaccompanied with increase its shelf life. The most of the proposed technologies are expensive and require sophisticatedequipment, but nanotechnology used in the packaging industry is an innovative method to solve this problem. Activepackaging based on polymer films contained metal nanoparticles is a new generation of this technology in the foodindustry. In this paper, three types of metallic nanoparticles (e.g. Ag, ZnO and CuO) with different weight percentageswere added to low density polyethylene (LDPE) and films were prepared by melt extrusion method. Nanocompositefracture surface morphology was investigated using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). UV absorbance is one of theprominent properties of film in food packaging to prevent the defective effect of these rays. As expected, the filmscontaining ZnO nanoparticles have the highest UV absorption. Antimicrobial properties of different nanocomposite filmswere compared the using colony counting method. In fact, the main objective of this project is preparing of LDPEmetallicnanocomposite films and evaluation of their antimicrobial properties as active films in food packaging industry.

کلیدواژه ها:

nanocomposite ، active packaging ، antimicrobial properties ، metallic nanoparticles