Plasma polymer free radicals

It is tempting to use such relatively simple wet chemical methods to determine the amount of free radical on plasma polymers and on polymers treated with glow discharge. However, these methods have serious limitations when applied to the dangling bonds in plasma polymers or polymer free radicals in polymers treated with glow discharge. The most serious limitation is the accessibility of the chemical to the free radicals to be analyzed. Another serious limitation is the specificity of chemical reactions. 

Infrared Spectrum. The plasma polymerized organic film shows features distinctive from the conventional polymer. According to ESR measurements (31), the film contains a high concentration of residual free radicals, which showed a relatively long life time. The free radicals were oxidized in air and the oxidization is promoted significantly at elevated temperatures. The film is not soluble in usual solvents and it is more thermally stable than the conventional polymers. These properties are thought to be caused by the highly crosslinked structure of the film (32). 

The parameters of treatment were chosen since these led to the most pronounced changes of polymer surface in our previous experiments [70-74]. It was observed elsewhere that plasma treatment of polymer macromolecules results in their cleavage, ablation, alterations of chemical structure and thus affects surface properties e g. solubility [75]. The chemical structure of modified polyethylene (PE) was characterized by FTIR and XPS spectroscopy. Exposition to discharge leads to cleavage of polymeric chains and C-H bonds followed by generation of free radicals which easily oxidize [10,76]. By FTIR spectroscopy the presence of new oxidized structures within whole specimen volume can be detected. IR spectra in the 1710-1745 cm" interval [71,77] from PE, exposed to... 

Due to plasma treatment the radicals (R, free spin) are generated on polymer chain. Not only C-H but also C-C bonds are likely to brake, the later leading to fragmentation of polymer chain. The radical concentration determined by EPR method is in Table 3. The concentration of free radicals R decreases during the aging to about quarter of the initial after 80 days. The decrease of R is a result of radical recombination [h]. Detailed comment of EPR observation ( aging of radicals) is described too [79]. 

A very common and useful approach to studying the plasma polymerization process is the careful characterization of the polymer films produced. A specific property of the films is then measured as a function of one or more of the plasma parameters and mechanistic explanations are then derived from such a study. Some of the properties of plasma-polymerized thin films which have been measured include electrical conductivity, tunneling phenomena and photoconductivity, capacitance, optical constants, structure (IR absorption and ESCA), surface tension, free radical density (ESR), surface topography and reverse osmosis characteristics. So far relatively few of these measurements were made with the objective of determining mechanisms of plasma polymerization. The motivation in most instances was a specific application of the thin films. Considerable emphasis on correlations between mass spectroscopy in polymerizing plasmas and ESCA on polymer films with plasma polymerization mechanisms will be given later in this chapter based on recent work done in this laboratory. 

The adsorption of both monomer and gas phase free radicals is expected to occur at the surface of the polymer film in contact with the plasma. If equilibrium is established between a species in the gas phase and the equivalent adsorbed species, then the surface coverage by the j species can be expressed as... 

The rate coefficients appearing in Eqns. 17 through 19 should not be strongly temperature dependent since radical-atom and radical-radical recombination are most often either unactivated or weakly activated processes. In the case of the recombination of two surface free radicals, the rate is likely to be limited by the mobility of the polymer chains attached to the radicals. For very short chains, as are commonly produced in plasma polymerization , only those radicals which are nearest or next nearest neighbors are likely to react. If one of the radicals... 

The role of gas phase initiation processes was further explored by Tibbitt et al. . These authors proposed that the polymerization of unsaturated hydrocarbons in a 13.56 MHz plasma is initiated by free radicals formed in the gas by electron-monomer collisions, the initiation reactions listed in Table 6. Moreover, it was assumed that the formation of free radicals on the polymer surface due to the impact of charged particles could be neglected. This assumption is supported by the fact that at 13.56 MHz and pressures near one torr the discharge frequency is significantly greater than either f, or f and that as a result the fluxes of charged particles to the electrode surfaces are quite small. 

During the plasma surface reaction, the plasma and the solid are in physical contact, but electrically isolated. Surfaces in contact with the plasma are bombarded by free radicals, electrons, ions, and photons, as generated by the reactions listed above. The energy transferred to the solid is dissipated within the solid by a variety of chemical and physical processes, as illustrated in Figure 7.95. These processes can change surface wettability (cf. Sections 1.4.6 and 2.2.2.3), alter molecular weight of polymer surfaces or create reactive sites on polymers. These effects are summarized in Table 7.21. 

Regime "D" Finally, after plasma treatment, free radical sites at or near the polymer surface can remain active for extensive periods of time (11). When the treated sample is subsequently exposed to ambient atmosphere, these radicals can chemically react with atmospheric constituents such as oxygen or water vapor. This certainly can occur during the time interval while the sample is transferred through atmosphere from the plasma reactor to the ESCALAB surface instrument. 

The unique capabilities of chemical vapor deposition are clearly demonstrated by the thin films belonging to this class of polymers. Yasuda et al first studied and reported the polymerization of organic compounds in glow discharge. Polymerization of organic compounds in the presence of plasma is quite different from the conventional chemically or radiatively initiated polymerization. For instance, polymerization of styrene in conventional polymerization can be done using several means of initiation such as radiation, pyrolysis induced, etc., to create the free radical species. But the propagation is... 

Plasma-induced species act as initiator of polymerization. Polymerization characteristics and properties of polymers formed by plasma-induced polymerization strongly resemble those of the thermal polymerization of the corresponding monomer [2-12]. Results indicate that plasma-induced polymerization is a free radical addition polymerization initiated by difunctional free radicals created by plasma. The molecular weight of polymer increases with the polymerization time, which is distinctively different from the initiator-initiated free radical addition polymerization. 

After a long reaction time, polymers with exceptionally high molecular weight can be synthesized by plasma-induced polymerization. Since only brief contact with luminous gas phase is involved, plasma-induced polymerization is not considered to be LCVD. However, it is important to recognize that the luminous gas phase can produce chemically reactive species that trigger conventional free radical addition polymerization. This mode of material formation could occur in LCVD depending on the processing conditions of LCVD, e.g., if the substrate surface is cooled to the extent that causes the condensation of monomer vapor. 

XPS data, on the other hand, showed that the ETC AT treatment of Ar + CF4 and Ar + C2F4 yielded just as good, if not better, fluorination of PET fibers than radio frequency plasma treatment with these gases [14,15]. These examples clearly demonstrate that polymerizable species in plasma polymerization are not photon-emitting species in most cases. This is in accordance with the growth and deposition mechanism based on free radicals, which account for the presence of large amount of dangling bonds in most plasma polymers. 

In the chain growth free radical polymerization of a vinyl monomer (conventional polymerization), the growth reaction is the repeated reaction of a free radical with numbers of monomer molecules. According to the termination by recombination of growing chains, 2 free radicals and 1000 monomer molecules leads to a polymer with the degree of polymerization of 1000. In contrast to this situation, the growth and deposition mechanisms of plasma polymerization as well as of parylene polymerization could be represented by recombinations of 1000 free radicals (some of them are diradicals) to form the three-dimensional network deposit via 1000 kinetic... 

FREE RADICALS IN PLASMA POLYMER AND FREE RADICALS IN SUBSTRATE... 

TMS deposition on PE showed only substrate signals with no detectable TMS signal (Fig. 6.12b). The absence of the TMS signal in this system could be due to the fast reaction of TMS radicals with the surface radicals generated from PE. The more likely explanation is that the number of free radicals in the plasma polymer layer is too small in comparison with the free radicals created in the bulk of the substrate, PE. What we see in Figure 6.13 is the decay of PE polymer free radicals, which were created by the luminous gas of TMS. With substantial decay of the PE free radicals, TMS dangling bonds, which decay much slower, became discernible. 

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