A novel process against cork taint

Abstract

The latter-day development of nanotechnology has brought revolution in many scientific areas, such as material and biomedical engineering. The carbon nanostructures perform extraordinary properties making them potential useful in a great number of applications, such as energy storage, electrical circuits and as vessel for drug delivery. According to the current work, the use of Carbon NanoTubes (CNTs) in cork stopper processing is first suggested in order to improve final cork quality. The proposed treatment is based on the colmation technique, which is often applied by many cork industries for the superficial refinement of cork closures. The insertion of CNTs in the external porous surface of cork during colmation, combined with their high adsorption tendency against a variety of organic molecules can probably lead to better quality stoppers. The randomly sparse nanoparticles into the external cork structure is expected to act as a ‘barrier’ for odorous compounds, like 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), between cork and bottled wine, shielding the wine from the undesirable phenomenon of cork taint. The design of the suggested process with its technical advantages and disadvantages are cited in this paper, opening the route for its laboratory, pilot and industrial scale implementation