Natural Carrageenan/Psyllium Composite Hydrogels Embedded Montmorillonite and Investigation of Their Use in Agricultural
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Natural Carrageenan/Psyllium Composite Hydrogels Embedded Montmorillonite and Investigation of Their Use in Agricultural Water Management Demet Aydınoğlu1 · Nurcan Karaca2 · Özgür Ceylan2 Accepted: 30 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The carrageenan/psyllium composite hydrogels with embedded montmorillonite have been successfully prepared for the synthesis of a new hydrogel material that is natural, biodegradable and to be used as an absorbent in agriculture. Hydrogels with different composition ratios were found to have the water absorption capacities attaining 2893% and 775%, for free and under load conditions, respectively. The one-way compressional test results have yielded the module values reaching to 226 kPa and showed that they increase with the carrageenan and montmorillonite contents. The hydrogels exhibited different morphological structure depending on the composition ratios. On the other hand, the contribution of the gels to the water absorption and the water retention properties of the soil was investigated by applying various tests to the soil samples mixed with hydrogels. The results showed that including the hydrogels into soil at a ratio of 0.4% increased the water holding capacity of soil from 0.533 to 0.836 g/g and raised the water content % of the soil more than 60%. Additionally, biodegradation test results indicated that depending on the compositional ratios, the hydrogels exhibited a high biodegradation behavior with a weight loss of 39.88% at the end of 35th day. These all finding suggest that these new natural composite hydrogels would be an eco-friendly alternative to present synthetic soil conditioners. Keywords Hydrogels · Carrageenan · Psyllium · Agriculture · Soil conditioner
Introduction Agriculture is one of the areas where water is used the most, and it is known that more than 70% of the total water used is spent for irrigation [1].Various researches are being carried out to bring this high rate down, and new methods are introduced. One of these methods is the use of materials with water absorption feature to be placed in the soil. The main substances that increase the water holding capacity of the soil are: perlite [2], pumice [3], zeolite [4], montmorillonite [5] and superabsorbent polymers/hydrogels [6–11]. The use of hydrogels as water absorbents in this area is remarkable in recent years. Hydrogels, consisting of * Demet Aydınoğlu [email protected] 1
Armutlu Vocational School, Department of FoodProcessing, Yalova University, 77500 Yalova, Turkey
Central Research Laboratory Research andApplication Centre, Yalova University, 77100 Yalova, Turkey
2
chemical or physical cross-linked hydrophilic polymers, have the ability to absorb water up to thousands of times their own weight thanks to the hydrophilic groups in their structure and their porous structure in various sizes. In particular, the use of acrylate-based synthetic superabsorbent hydrogels is common in the agricultural field. It i
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