Effect on Wettability of FEP Teflon Surface Morphology

Abstract

Wettability of FEP Teflon® (a perfluorinated ethylene-propylene copolymer) is vastly improved by heterogeneous nucleation and crystallization in contact with gold, a high surface free energy substrate. The critical surface tension of wetting (γe) increases from 18.8 dynes/cm to 40.4 dynes/cm. We compute that this rise in γe results from a 20 percent increase in the surface density of gold-nucleated FEP Teflon®. The increase in critical surface tension from 18.8 dynes/cm to 20.6 dynes/cm, for as received FEP Teflon which had been crosslinked by helium in a glow discharge (CASING technique), suggests an increase of the surface density with crosslinking. The critical surface tension of the gold-nucleated FEP Teflon® is sharply decreased from 40.4 dynes/cm to 22.0 dynes/cm by short exposure to the CASING treatment in helium. The results of ATR infrared spectroscopy show that in the surface region of the polymer there are no chemical changes such as the presence of unsaturated groups or the introduction of polar groups by oxidation. We conclude from this study that wettability of the polymer surface is affected by the surface morphology.