Surface pretreatment of plastics for adhesive bonding

Abstract

Many plastics have a poor tendency to bond to other materials because of their inherent inert chemical structure and thus require a pretreatment. Wet chemical methods are expensive because of the disposal of the waste liquids. In this study, the corona treatment (Iona] process), the low-pressure plasma process, and the fluorination process were tested and compared with each other. The following plastics were tested: PP (polypropylene), PBT (polybutyleneterephthalate), PBT blends, and a high-temperature thermoplastic, PEEK (polyetheretherketone). In particular, the low-temperature plasma process results in excellent adhesion strength. In addition, we have shown that the stability of freshly plasma-treated surfaces could be maintained for time periods of at least several days

Bonding of thermoplastic polymer microfluidics

“…Surface treatments are widely used in macro-scale polymer engineering to increase surface energy prior to bonding. Examples include solvent or acid treatments (Wu 1982), surface grafting (Uyama et al 1998;Hu and Brittain 2005), and both vacuum (Kruse et al 1995;Collaud et al 1994) and atmospheric (Shenton et al 2001) plasmas. For microfluidic applications, plasma activation is commonly used to modify PDMS surfaces with silanol groups (Eddings et al 2008), resulting in covalent bond between mating elastomer layers, and this technique has been widely applied to thermoplastic microfluidics as well.…”

Influence of dc Pulsed Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Jet Processing Conditions on Polymer Activation

“…A large range of techniques have been used to overcome this problem. These include the use of chemical treatments [2], flame [3], corona [4] as well as both low pressure and atmospheric pressure plasmas [5,6]. A particular advantage of plasma treatments for activating polymers is the uniformity of the treatment [7].…”

Comparison between XPS‐ and FTIR‐analysis of plasma‐treated polypropylene film surfaces

“…Chemical activation of the surfaces is the most utilized method, [2] however, the ecological requirements force the industry to search for alternative environmentally benign methods. The application of cold plasmas to modify surface properties of polymers is such a rapid and environmentally friendly process.…”