Tuesday, August 24, 2010 5:50 PM
Perfecting Surface Adhesion of Coatings with Plasma Fields
By Poul Jensen
Surface tension keeps pond-skating insects from sinking and soap bubbles from popping. However, in other areas of life, it can cause adhesive contact surfaces to fail, medical tubing to block – and worse. Determining the surface energy of a polymer surface is critical to ensuring proper coating quality, as well as the adhesion properties – especially with the growing popularity of water-based inks, coatings, and adhesives.
As part of the device manufacturing process, it is often necessary to apply coatings on medical devices made from polymer materials. For liquid coatings to adhere to the surface of moulded or extruded plastics, the surface energy of the solid material should be increased. This improves wettability—a surface’s ability to have liquids such as coatings spread evenly across its surface—which is required to promote stronger adhesion. But while polymer materials have numerous advantages, more...
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