Surface Modification of Polymers Under Cold Plasma Conditions, 1995 Nonwovens Conference Proceedings

A. Majid Sarmadi & F. Denes

University of Wisconsin

Advanced technologies often require the coexistence of properties inherent in polymeric materials, such as light weight, mechanical strength, electrical insulation, etc., and specific surface characteristics, like adhesion, abra-sion resistance, surface functionality, special optical and electrical properties and so on, for specific applications. Cold plasma surface modification and/or grafting pro-cesses offer unique and unlimited possibilities in this field. Although macromolecular plasma chemistry re-corded significant developments in the last two decades, many aspects of this new branch of chemistry are not yet fully understood. This lack is in part due to the scat-tered experimental data from different geometry plasma reactors and large spectrum of plasma parameters em-ployed in the experiments, and to the absence of ad-equate in situ plasma diagnostic techniques for reac-tive gas-plasmas. Using conventional polymerization mechanisms to explain the formation of so-called plasma polymers makes the situation even more confused. This paper discusses the discharge-induced gaseous phase molecular fragmentation processes and their influence on the plasma polymerization and plasma-enhanced surface modification mechanisms. The authors empha-size the importance of separating and identifying neu-tral species, resulting from recombining plasma-gen-erated active species, for understanding the polymer forming and surface modification reactions.