Hydrolyzed salep/gelatin-g-polyacrylamide as a novel micro/nano-porous superabsorbent hydrogel: Synthesis, optimization and investigation on swelling behavior

A novel micro/nano-porous super absorbent hydrogel was synthesized via graft copolymerization of acrylamide (aam) onto salep (a polysaccharide mixture) and a gelatin (a protein) hybrid backbone, after hydrolysis of this system. the taguchi method was applied for the experiments, and standard 18 orthogonal arrays (oa), with seven factors and three levels for each factor, were the proposed trial conditions. considering the results of 18 trials, according to the analysis of variance (anova), optimum conditions were suggested. in addition, swelling kinetics, swelling in various organic solvents, the absorbency under load (aul) and on-off switching behavior were investigated. also, the hydrogel formation was confirmed by fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ftir). the surface morphology of the synthesized hydrogels was assessed by scanning electron microscopy (sem) and showed a micro/nano-porous structure. also, the surface area and total pore volume of the optimized hydrogel were measured using the brunauer-emmett- teller (bet) technique.