Abstract
The reactions that can occur on organic materials treated in plasma enviorement are strongly affected by surface temperature, thus the sharp determination of this variable is extremely important to process control. In situ temperature measurements are often employed; however, the measured point is generally under the treated surface. If in metallic materials the high thermal conductivity minimizes this problem, in non-metallic materials processing it becomes important, because its thermal resistivity besides a high sensibility to small temperature variations. The present work uses a simulation tool to extract thermal data on Ar+O2 RF plasma processing of Stearic Acid. Experimental data were obtained by thermocouples placed inside the samples. The extrapolation of surface temperature was performed by numerical simulation with Autodesk CFD software v.15.1. Results show that the temperature of the surface reaches values higher than the ones measured inside the sample holder. This difference of temperature is in good agreement with the visual observation of the phase transformations in the treated material, showing a simple and valuable tool to better control of plasma treatments.
Highlights
It is already common knowledge, by thermodynamic laws and Arrhenius equation, that the material's temperature influences its reactivity with the environment, either in kinetic form, in the form of activation energy[1], surface temperature for processes like etch rate[2], deposition rate[3,4,5], or polymerization[4,6] of the materials exposed to plasmas
The simulation tool proposed here was able to successfully predict several conditions related to thermal phenomena occurring on the degradation process of an organic material by plasma
Chemical and physical effects can plays important role on this heating, which is enough to melt the material in seconds of treatment, even when the temperature measurement was considerably different from the melting point
Summary
It is already common knowledge, by thermodynamic laws and Arrhenius equation, that the material's temperature influences its reactivity with the environment, either in kinetic form (reaction rate), in the form of activation energy (heat required to allow the beginning of a reaction)[1], surface temperature for processes like etch rate[2], deposition rate[3,4,5], or polymerization[4,6] of the materials exposed to plasmas. Many works were conducted with techniques that would allow the measurement of this variable in surface treatments, especially in plasma systems. In cleaning and degradation plasma processes, where specific reactions of organic compounds depends on the temperature[10,11], the correct analysis of this variable is very important. It has already been evidenced that in relatively high temperatures (313 K)[12,13], even when the material begins in the solid state, functionalization reactions becomes more important than degradation, leading to polymerization processes. Treatments at lower temperatures (273 K) lead to high mass loss, where
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