abstract
- LSRE financing by FEDER/POCI/2010. Ph.D. schorlarship by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) (SFRH/BD/43215/2008)
- The objective of this work is to access the release behavior of thymol and p-cymene used as model core materials with PLA microcapsules. The microcapsules were obtained by a coacervation process developed in a previous work and present a spherical shape with mean particle size of 25 and 37 mu m for thymol and p-cymene, respectively. The results have shown that the release of thymol and p-cymene is faster in the first hour keeping almost constant in the subsequent days. The diffusion coefficient in the first hour of release was 1.99 X 10(-16) m(2)/s for thymol and 4.34 X 10(-16) m(2)/s for p-cymene. However, the diffusion was slower if considering a period of 5 days being the diffusion coefficients of 3.34 X 10(-19) m(2)/s for thymol and 3.45 X 10(-18) m(2)/s for cymene.