Abstract
We investigated the enhancement of the capillary effect in a plastic capillary tube using only a nanostructured surface. Since plastic is a hydrophobic material, the capillary effect does not emerge without an additional coating or plasma treatment process. Therefore, capillary effect enhancement by the nanostructure fabrication method is expected to reduce the cost and minimise the contamination produced in the human body. By combining a hydrophilic nylon resin and a nanostructure at the tip of the plastic pipette, we could confirm that the capillary effect was produced solely by the tube fabrication process. The produced capillary effect increased linearly with increasing nanostructure height when a standard solution with a surface tension of 70 mN·m−1 was used. Thus, we can conclude that including the plastic part with nanostructure can be useful for biomedical applications. In addition, we suggest that the proposed method is highly effective in controlling the wetting properties of plastic surfaces, compared to the typical coating or plasma treatment processes.
Highlights
IntroductionSince plastic is a hydrophobic material, the capillary effect does not emerge without an additional coating or plasma treatment process
Advanced Manufacturing Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Research Institute for Energy Conservation, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and
We investigated the capillary effect of a plastic capillary tube by using a nanostructure
Summary
Since plastic is a hydrophobic material, the capillary effect does not emerge without an additional coating or plasma treatment process. We suggest that the proposed method is highly effective in controlling the wetting properties of plastic surfaces, compared to the typical coating or plasma treatment processes. The applications of these methods are limited because of the peeling of the additional coated layer, which severely impedes their medical and biological applications To mitigate these drawbacks, an alternative method that does not involve an additional coating process is a necessary requirement for controlling the wetting property of material surfaces. The plasma treatment method is one of the most promising methods to realize surface wettability control without an additional coating process [8,9] This method produces OH radicals on the material surface, whose hydrophilic properties depend on the surface density of the OH radicals [10]. The hydrophilic properties of polymers can be maintained for a longer duration by selecting appropriate materials and increasing the additive compound concentration, the retained hydrophilicity is insufficient for the aforementioned applications of plastics
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