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Hydration is one of the crucial properties for understanding the behavior of any chemical material. Due to the presence of hydrogen bonds together with hydrophobic and other types of intermolecular interactions water sorption influences the properties of the substances. Moreover, the importance of the absorbability is even higher when speaking about biopolymers which are somehow connected with hydrogels applications, potentially used in wound healing. The aim of this work was to study water sorption ability of selected biopolymers (dextran, chitosan, hyaluronan) and humic acid using two thermoanalytical techniques: differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and relative humidity (RH) perfusion microcalorimetry. These methods which are based on different measurement principle can give a complex overview on the sorption behavior of the sample. The results show expected differences of both temperature of melting and heat of hydration which are caused by many factors such as presence of side functional groups on the biopolymer chain, solubility of the studied biopolymers in water or molecular weight when speaking about hyaluronan.
Keywords: hydration, biopolymers, DSC, perfusion microcalorimetry© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.