Improving the performance of polyvinyl chloride with added natural extracts for medical storage

Abstract Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is a candidate biopolymer for medical packaging due to its inertness to biological fluids, high mechanical and chemical resistance, and wide range of processing possibilities. Blood bags were fabricated to obtain a flexible blood bag with high durability, antibacterial resistance, and good bio-properties. Recently, most of the problems related to blood bags available in hospitals are related to the synthetic plasticizer added to the base material to provide the required flexibility for application, but these synthetic materials harm human blood as they lead to blood dissolution and thus blood corruption quickly. So the present work focuses on modifying the properties of PVC by incorporating extracted natural materials including basil seeds at different concentrations (1%, 2%, and 3%) using solvent cast method. Then, extracted wheat gel at concentrations (0.5 and 1%) was added to composite samples containing basil seed gel (3%). The resulting samples were characterized by tensile, water absorption, FTIR, wettability, transparency, antibacterial, and hemolytic tests. It was found that the ultimate tensile strength decreased with increasing concentration of two additives. While the elastic modulus value decreased when basil seed gel was added, but tended to increase when wheat gel was added. The elongation ratio results showed improvement with the addition of gel. The results showed that the water absorption and wettability of the composites increased with the increase of the additive concentration. The results also showed that these materials had better resistance to S. aureus and C. albicans bacteria. The transparency and hemolysis results decreased with the addition of a gel enhancer. According to the obtained results the resultant composite has better properties than commercial blood bags and is more suitable for blood bags.