Fibres for wound dressings based on mixed carbohydrate polymer fibres

Polysaccharide-based dressings have increasingly become viable alternatives to somewhat incompatible and often problematic cotton or viscose gauzes traditionally used for wound dressings. Abundant availability of alginates and their relative ease of reversible solubility in particular have been instrumental in their development into fibres and lately their application as vehicles for delivering drugs. This paper reports on the spinning efficiency of various alginate types (i.e. differing mannuronic/guluronic acid ratios) in a laboratory-based extrusion system and explores the effect of proportional inclusion of a second polysaccharide compound, an arabinoxylan named branan ferulate, on tensile properties of the resulting fibres. It was shown that in the chemical assessment of the fibres, that arabinose content, one of the branan ferulate component monosaccharides, could be used as a means of estimating the branan ferulate content of the fibre. Utilising such an analytical approach has enabled the branan ferulate contents of the fibres to be assessed. Accordingly there need be little anxiety over branan ferulate losses during the production of branan ferulate/alginate fibres by the wet spinning production method.