Fidelia N. Nnadi
Human activities require more and more resources- among them water is certainly the most precious. Modern agriculture consumes almost two thirds of the water pumped in United States. For this reason, more and more people are seeking ways to conserve it. In the quest for improving water conservation in soils during irrigation, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) conducted studies on various materials in the early 1960s. As a result, a resin based on the grafting of acrylonitrile polymer onto the backbone of starch molecules (starch-grafting) was developed, which was known as ?Super Slurper?. At the time, the USDA gave the basic technology to several USA companies for further development. As the Japanese companies were excluded from participating, they started independent research using starch, carboxy methyl cellulose (CMC), acrylic acid, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and isobutylene maleic anhydride (IMA). The hydrolyzed product of the hydrolysis of this starch-acrylonitrile co-polymer gave water absorption greater than 400 times its weight and did not release water as fiber-based absorbents do. Could super absorbent polymer (SAP) be the future of irrigation water conservation?
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