Abstract
Two methods—attenuated total reflection Fourier infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS)—have been used to analyze the chemical structure of polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE) thin coatings deposited by pulsed laser (PLD) and pulsed electron beam (PED) ablations. The volume of the analyzed materials is significantly different in these techniques which can be of great importance in the characterization of highly heterogeneous thin films. Optical microscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) have been additionally used to examine the coating surface morphology. The studies have shown that in the case of thin polymer coatings deposited by physical methods, the application for chemical structure evaluation of complementary techniques, with different surface sensitivity, together with the use of surface topography imaging, provide unique insight into the film morphology. The results can provide information contributing to an in-depth understanding of the deposition mechanism of polymer coatings.
Highlights
Polytetrafluoroethylene is a synthetic polymer that is often used as a coating because of its particular combination of chemical and mechanical properties such as flexibility at low temperatures, low coefficient of friction, stability at high temperatures, high chemical resistance to corrosive reagents, insolubility in the majority of organic solvents, long-term weatherability, nonflammability, and hydrophobicity [1,2,3]
Chemical structure analysis based on infrared spectroscopy is a very useful technique able to determine the structure of thin films quite accurately as we have shown in our previous work [20]
It can be4seen of 14 that the coating obtained by the pulsed electron beam (PED) method is very smooth, whilst the surface of the coating obtained obtained bymethod the PLDismethod by numerous large particulates
Summary
Polytetrafluoroethylene is a synthetic polymer that is often used as a coating because of its particular combination of chemical and mechanical properties such as flexibility at low temperatures, low coefficient of friction, stability at high temperatures, high chemical resistance to corrosive reagents, insolubility in the majority of organic solvents, long-term weatherability, nonflammability, and hydrophobicity [1,2,3]. Conventional wet methods for the preparation of thin polymer films, such as spin coating, are often not suitable for PTFE due to its poor solubility in all solvents and non-stick behavior. For these reasons, physical methods such as vacuum evaporation, radio frequency sputtering, plasma evaporation, and ion beam sputtering are of great interest because they are not solvent dependent [6,7,8,9,10]. Pulsed laser deposition (PLD) and pulsed electron deposition (PED) are examples of physical methods that are considered to be promising alternatives to traditional methods of producing very thin films of stoichiometric polymer. PLD and PED methods are dry processes and may be useful in cases where the polymer cannot be processed by conventional thermal or solution techniques [11,12]
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