Contact Angle and Wettability of Commercial Polymers Studies after Treatment

Polymers have wide range of applications in different manufacturing areas including ‘food packaging’. This is mainly due to properties, such as excellent thermal stability, low density and low cost. Recent studies regards the surface treatment in PVC, in which, this material showed interesting properties as low roughness, high transparency in the visible range, being aligned to the character hydrophobic/hydrophilic. Possible alterations of surface of PVC are related to the Radiofrequency (rf) plasma technologies using fluorinated gases at low-temperature reaction (in many cases the treatment can be achieved at room temperature, which avoid the thermal degradation of the material). Among the techniques applied for PVC, PET, LDPE, PP or other polyolefin surface modification, Plasma Immersion techniques were recently studied in three different electronic configurations: (i) sample grounded (anode), (ii) sample polarized by radiofrequency (cathode), (iii) sample polarized with high voltage of negative pulses (PIII) using fluorine plasmas at low temperature regime. There was not reported in the literature, a work that compares those three different configurations of PECVD techniques, focusing on the gain of thermodynamics properties (Wettability and surface roughness).

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.