NANO-HYBRID MICROCAPSULES VIA COMPLEX COACERVATION OF GELATIN AND LAPONITE

Microencapsulation plays an important role in almost all areas of our lives, including, food industry, medicine, and pharmacy. One of the most common technics that is used formicroencapsulation is complex coacervation, which is based on electrostatic interaction between oppositely chargedpolyelectrolytes [1]. Based on previous studies which confirm the possibility of electrostatic interaction between gelatin and nanoclay sheets [2, 3], we introduce gelatin-nanoclaycoacervate as a new material for enveloping core materials via complex coacervation method. Gelatin-nanoclay bionanocompositeshave numerous advantages, including, improved thermal, mechanical and barrier properties which can provide special applications for these microcapsules.Briefly, the aim of this work was to appraise the effect of governing parameters on formation of microcapsules. To this end, design of experiment technique was used to simultaneously evaluate the effect of pH, core/wall ratio, gelatin/nanoclay ratio and concentration of wall material on quality of the gelatine based nano-biohybrid microcapsules