Engineering Commons^™

Thermodynamics Of Migration In Polymers: Can Contamination From Materials In Contact Be Predicted, Controlled And Possibly Avoided?, Olivier Vitrac, Phuong Nguyen

Single-Use Technologies: Bridging Polymer Science to Biotechnology Applications

The contamination from materials is coined as “migration” and refers to a combination of various mass transfer mechanisms under thermodynamic control: molecular or mutual diffusion, sorption and desorption phenomena linear with concentration or not. The contamination pathways are particularly complicated when they involve several components or steps and strong interactions between materials and the medium in contact. They have been studied and mathematically described with two possible purposes: i) simplified approaches with a goal of overestimating the real contamination and ii) more sophisticated approaches to optimize the design of polymer materials, packaging materials or to redesign plastic additives with lower …