Rheological characterization of plasticized corn proteins for fused deposition modeling

Additive Manufacturing (AM) of tailored natural biopolymer-based objects by Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) opens new perspectives for applications such as biomedical temporary devices, or pharmaceutical tablets. This exploits the biocompatibility, resorbability and edibility properties of biopolymers. When adequately plasticized, zeins, storage proteins from endosperm of maize kernels, displayed thermomechanical properties possibly matching FDM processing requirements at a convenient temperature Tprinting=130°C. Indeed, with 20% glycerol added (Tg=42°C), plasticized zeins present a high modulus, E’>1GPa, at ambient conditions, which drops below 0.6 MPa at the processing temperature T=130°C, before flowing in the molten state. The rheological characterization shows that the processing window is limited by a progressive increase of viscosity linked to proteins aggregation and crosslinking by S-S bonding between cysteine amino acid residues, which can lead to gelation. However, for short residence time typi...