Study on the degradation of chitosan slurries

In the present work, we measured the degradation rate of different chitosan slurries. Several parameters were monitored such as temperature (25 degrees C, 37 degrees C, 50 degrees C); chitosan concentration 1% and 2% w/V)); and polymer molecular weight. The samples were tested in dynamic sweep test mode. This test is able to provide a reliable estimation of viscosity variations of the slurries; in turn, these variations could be related to degradation rate of the system in the considered conditions. The resulting information is particularly important especially in applications in which there is a close relationship between physical properties and molecular structure. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).