Abstract
Polymer modification plays an important role in the construction of devices, but the lack of fundamental understanding on polymer-surface adhesion limits the development of miniaturized devices. In this work, a thermoplastic polymer collection was established using the combinatorial laser-induced forward transfer technique as a research platform, to assess the adhesion of polymers to substrates of different wettability. Furthermore, it also revealed the influence of adhesion on dewetting phenomena during the laser transfer and relaxation process, resulting in polymer spots of various morphologies. This gives a general insight into polymer-surface adhesion and connects it with the generation of defined polymer microstructures, which can be a valuable reference for the rational use of polymers.
Highlights
Inert polymer coating is one of the most widely used methods for surface engineering in the construction of functional devices.[1−4] It can protect the devices from a harsh environment and provide a facile and efficient way to modulate their hydrophilic−hydrophobic nature to meet the requirements of diverse applications in biomedical and engineering fields.[5−8]Recent trends of integration and portability generate growing demand for miniaturized devices, which brings great opportunity to this field
To investigate the laser transfer of different thermoplastic polymers, we used a collection of commercially available thermoplastic polymers (Tables 1 and S1), including polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polylactic acid (PLA), polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), three different poly(styrene-block-methyl methacrylate) copolymers (PS-bPMMA 21 k:21 k, 20 k:50 k, and 52 k:52 k), and styrene− butylacrylic copolymer (SLEC)
These polymers were mainly selected due to standard availability and solubility in organic solvents, such as DCM and toluene, and only PVA is solely soluble in water
Summary
Inert polymer coating is one of the most widely used methods for surface engineering in the construction of functional devices.[1−4] It can protect the devices from a harsh environment and provide a facile and efficient way to modulate their hydrophilic−hydrophobic nature to meet the requirements of diverse applications in biomedical and engineering fields.[5−8]. By manipulating the laser irradiation parameters (e.g., spot size, power density, and irradiation time), the amount of the transferred polymer can be modulated, which is ideal to observe the behavior of polymer microdrops with controllable volume on a surface (Figure 1b).[24] the cLIFT technique is a representative method for the construction of miniaturized devices but a useful tool to study polymer-surface adhesion in the microscale region. The morphologies of formed polymer micropatterns were collected to reveal the influence of polymer polarity and surface wettability on the polymer-surface adhesion. This could be utilized as a reference to guide the use of thermoplastic polymers and the exploration of new polymers for surface engineering. Received: October 12, 2021 Revised: January 26, 2022 Published: February 9, 2022
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