Production of Alginate-Silica-Nanocellulose Composites with Cinnamon Essential Oil for Antimicrobial Sachet

Abstract

Food safety become important requirement that must be fulfilled before being consumed by people. The use of food packaging materials is an important role in maintaining food quality and safety. Antimicrobial sachet is one of the innovative technological concepts of active packaging that can inhibit undesirable microorganisms so that it can extend the shelf life of products. Silica and calcium alginate is used as a carrier material for antimicrobial compounds for the production of sachets. Nanocellulose is used as a filler in carrier matrix composite. One source of nanocellulose is oil palm empty bunches (OPEFB). The purpose of this final project is to produce the antimicrobial sachet using mixture of alginate and silika as the carrier materials with addition of nanocellulose (0, 1, 3, 5%) as a filler, and cinnamon essential oil as antimicrobial agent. The obtained nanocellulose and composites was analyzed by several analysis such as, morphologhy was observed by scanning electron method (SEM), chemical component by fourier transform infrared (FTIR), hardness by texture analyzer, thermal properties by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and crystallinity by X-ray diffraction (XRD). The performance of antimicrobial sachet was tested by release of essential oil and antimicrobial test. Addition of nanocellulose to the composite showed good mechanical properties and the morphologhy BDNC5 more compact and spherical than others. The antimicrobial sachet with addition of nanocellulose was proven to slow down the release of CEO from composite beads significantly, and had high inhibitory to microbial activity. The sachet that had good suppress the microbial growth is BDNC5. Almost all microorganisms tested by sachet BDCN5 showed high inhibitory, 5.43% in Escherichia coli, 5.19% in Salmonella sp, 3.36% in Aspergillus sp, and 8.72% in Staphylococcus aureus.