Johnner Sitompul
One of the applications of the Green Technology or Green Industry era is the production of environmentally friendly food wrapping. The market for packaging (food packaging) such as bio-plastic or bioplomer / nanocomposite will increase from year to year. Furthermore, the consumption of biodegradable plastic, especially Poly Lactic Acid (PLA) is very high and is predicted to grow around 23% until 2016 and its growth in the second highest Asia-Pacific region in the world, 30%. PLA use that grows rapidly because the polymer is biocompatible and environmentally friendly (bio-polymers) and therefore widely used as a food packaging. In addition to the nature of the biodegradability and biocompatibility, PLA has low thermal stability, brittle and low gas barrier so that food wrappers must be made to add strength (enhancement) so that the age of the food will be longer in PLA wrapping. One increase that is currently examined at this time is the addition of fillers to PLA so that it becomes nanocomposite. The relatively small addition, less than 5% nanoclay filler, against PLA will improve the desired properties so that the food wrappers are good and environmentally friendly. For this reason, this proposal aims to synthesis Pla-clay nanocomposite through the route solution intercalation method (intercalation dissolution method) of polymer from Lactic Acid and Nanoclay and followed by congregation with the High Intensity Ultrasonic Processor on a bench scale for the occurrence of intercalaltion and exfoliation advanced phenomena. The synthesis of nanocomposite with this method will be very challenging and is expected to occur intercallative from nanoclay when dissolution and and then the formation of exfoliated nanocomposite if the type of clay is obtained with the right treatment. A variety of variations on the condition of polymerization operations and Clay (Cloisite or Bentonite) will be carried out in this study. The nanocomposite film / thin layer will be formed with a solvent casting method and subsequently tested the nanocomposite sample to analyze nanocomposite properties with XRD, SEM, TEM and Penyannya physical properties with UTM, DSC and permeability test from nanocomposite for environmentally friendly food wrappers. Key Words: Lactic Acid, Clay, PLA, Solution Method, Intercalative and Exfoliated, Nanocomposite, Solvent Casting Method, Permeability, Food Packaging