Influence of successive plasma treatments on PP foils

Polypropylene (PP) foil is treated with a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma operating in helium at medium pressure. The influence of exposure to the atmosphere between successive treatments is studied by varying the exposure time. Each PP sample is treated with subsequent treatment steps of 5 s. Between two treatment steps, different procedures are applied: 1) the sample remains in the discharge chamber at medium pressure (under helium atmosphere) for a certain time before it is treated again or 2) the pressure is increased to atmospheric pressure, so the sample remains exposed to atmospheric air for a certain time and afterwards the system is pumped down again to medium pressure before it undergoes a successive helium plasma treatment. The treated samples are analysed using contact angle measurements. The results show that exposure to the atmosphere between two treatment steps leads to a lower contact angle. The longer the exposure time, the lower the contact angle becomes. Another experiment showed that the treatment effect could be gradually removed by applying several short plasma treatments of 1 s to saturated samples. With every short treatment step, the contact angle becomes higher. It is believed that this is due to etching of the surface. In the near future, both atomic force microscopy (AFM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis on some selected samples are planned to elucidate the chemical and/or physical nature of the observed phenomena.