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Wear Resistance of Low‐Temperature Plasma‐Polymerized Organosilica Deposited on Poly(ethylene terephthalate): The Effect of O 2 Addition
Author(s) -
Lin YungSen,
Chen ChingLun
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
plasma processes and polymers
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.644
H-Index - 74
eISSN - 1612-8869
pISSN - 1612-8850
DOI - 10.1002/ppap.200600034
Subject(s) - materials science , poly ethylene , ethylene , plasma , plasma polymerization , wear resistance , polymerization , composite material , chemical engineering , polymer chemistry , polymer , organic chemistry , chemistry , catalysis , engineering , physics , quantum mechanics
Summary: The wear resistance of PET substrates can be enhanced by low‐temperature plasma‐polymerization of organosilica (SiO x C y ); the effect of varying oxygen flow rates is investigated in this paper. It was found that the low‐temperature plasma‐polymerization of SiO x C y with tetramethylsilane (TMS) and oxygen (O 2 ) at room temperature (23 °C) can be used for improving the wear resistance of PET substrates, as demonstrated by scratch tests. The wear resistance of PET substrates was greatly enhanced from the completely scratched of the untreated PET substrates to no scratched of TMS/O 2 plasma‐polymerized PET substrates, which were obtained at high oxygen flow rates with a steel wool for 300 cycles at 300 g loading. The results of this study indicate that the wear resistance of the treated PET substrates was highly dependent on the surface characteristics of bare PET substrates. The hardness of PET substrates was determined by the pencil test, while the surface morphology was monitored by AFM. The atomic compositions and chemical bonding of the TMS/O 2 plasma‐polymerized organosilicas were analyzed by XPS.The wear loss Δ T (%) for the TMS/O 2 plasma‐polymerized PET substrates for various oxygen flow rates.