Development of non-thermal atmospheric pressure plasma system for surface modification of polymeric materials

Abstract

Non-thermal plasma has become one of the new technologies which are highly developed now days. This happens because the cold plasma using the principle of generated reactive gases that have the ability to modify the surface properties of a material or product without changing the original characteristics of the material. The purpose of this study is to develop a cold plasma system that operates at atmospheric pressure and investigates the effect of cold plasma treatment to change the surface characteristics of the polymer material polyethylene (PE) at various time conditions. We are successfully developing a non-thermal plasma system that can operate at atmospheric pressure and can be run with Helium or Argon gas. The characteristics of plasma will be discussed from the view of its electrical property, plasma discharge regime andoperation temperature. Experiment results on plasma treatment on PE material shows the changes of surface properties of originally hydrophobic material PE becomes hydrophilic by only few seconds of plasma treatment and level of hydrophilicity become greater with increasing duration of plasma treatment. Confirmation of this is shown by the measurement of contact angle of droplets of water on the surface of PE are getting smaller.