Proton conductive thin films prepared by plasma polymerization

Challenges in the characterization of plasma polymers using XPS

“…Mainly focused on vacuum plasmas, a growing number of studies using mass spectrometry (MS) to characterize the gas phase during plasma deposition of organic [25,[36][37][38] and inorganic [39][40][41][42][43] coatings as well as during plasma etching/ablation of polymer surfaces [44,45] can be found in the literature. The above-cited references attest that, although MS does not provide direct, unambiguous chemical information due to possible fragmentation in the ionization chamber, one can easily discern fragmentation and/or oligomerization phenomena as soon as (in)organic molecules (precursor or monomer) are subjected to plasma discharges.…”

Synthesis and optimization of proton exchange membranes by a pulsed plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition technique

“…Due to its complexity, the mechanism of the polymer formation is still under debate [29e31]. It is generally believed that the process involves the fragmentation of monomer molecules and the recombination of these fragments [7,11,15]. Specifically, the plasma discharge generates energetic particles, which collide with monomer molecules to produce the active species, such as excited molecules, free radicals and ions, due to the fragmentation of monomers.…”

“…In the conventional plasma polymerization with a continuous wave (cw) plasma discharge, the monomer molecules are prone to dissociation due to their random collisions with the energetic plasma particles generated by the plasma discharge and the energy nonuniformity of these plasma particles, which makes the introduction of functional groups (such as ion exchange moieties) into the polymer membranes rather difficult [11,14]. The fabricated membranes are thus reported to be with low contents of proton exchange groups and exhibit lower intrinsic proton conductivity than Nafion [11,15]. To address this problem, a new plasma polymerization technique which uses a low frequency, after-glow capacitively coupled plasma (AGCCP) discharge to synthesize PEMs has been developed [10,16,17].…”

X‐Ray Reflectometry Characterization of Plasma Polymer Films Synthesized from Triallylamine: Density and Swelling in Water

“…[4] During the last decade, our group and others have begun studying the application of plasma polymerized materials as components of fuel cells and especially as ion-exchange membranes. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] This original approach requires a judicious choice of the precursor (also called monomer) and the adjustment of plasma parameters so that the manufactured plasma polymers could present ion-exchange properties. This study deals precisely with the implementation of plasma polymerization using triallylamine as precursor.…”