Surface Modification of Polymers Through Plasma

Generally, polymer surface engineering has vast applications in biotechnology,membranes, self-cleaning and electronic devices. These applications are based oncontrollable changing in some properties such as surface energy, surface topography, andbiocompatibility of polymer. For choosing a proper method for the surface modificationof polymer, three parameters should be considered carefully. These parameters include:chemical structure of polymer which is focused on strengths and weaknesses of demandedpolymer, the surface properties that we need to achieve after treatment and finally surfacegeometry which is related to the presence or absence of porosity and or chemical andphysical heterogeneity of polymer surface. This research investigates the popular surfacemodification methods like wet chemistry, flame, plasma, UV radiation, laser and grafting.Furthermore, for accurate understanding of quantitative and qualitative changes of surfaceproperties of polymers, the general characteristics of used methods (depth analyzed,resolution, and analytical sensitivity) were briefly mentioned. Some of the popularmethods for include contact angle measurement, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy(FTIR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), X-rayphotoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), secondary-ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), Augerelectron spectroscopy (AES) and scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM).