Physical and Chemical Effects on the Sonication Treatment of Chitosan Solution

As the first step of studies related to production of chitooligosaccharides by physical methods, chitosan solution were sonicated with 20 kHz and various treatment effects were examined to present fundamental data of sonicated chitosan solution. Intrinsic viscosity of chitosan solution sharply decreased from 3.76 dl/g to 2.90 dl/g until 5 minutes of sonication and then slowly decreased. With low volume of chitosan solution, sonication was very effective and temperature of chitosan solution slightly affected the efficiency of sonication. In case of changing the solvent, no significant differences were observed on the effect of sonication, however, acetate buffer had highest sonication effect among various solvents. The sonication effect was increased as the increasement of the value of pH, on the contrary, ionic strength and type of counterions showed no effect on sonication. With these results, we assumed that optimal sonication treatment would be as follows, solution volume was $10\~20\;ml$, temperature range was $20\~30^{\circ}C$, pH value of solution was 4.5 and type of solvent was acetate buffer.