Mono-material films

Products composed of one type of plastic only. Examples are monolayer foils used, e.g., in packaging for bakery or in the form of bags for household application. It is worth noting that a mono-material film, consisting, e.g., of polypropylene, may contain more than one component. If the film is coloured, this is obtained by mixing a polypropylene matrix with a colourant carried by another polypropylene, normally of lower molecular weight. 

In the case of boundary layer lubrication, in which the adsorption of mono-molecular films is required, the best protection is provided by materials such as fatty acids and soaps that can adsorb strongly at the surface to form a solid condensed film. Less durable but effective protection can be obtained with polar groups such as alcohols, thiols, or amines. The least effective protection is obtained with simple hydrocarbons that adsorb more or less randomly and through dispersion forces alone. For adsorbed monomolecular films, best results are obtained when the hydrocarbon tail has at least 14 carbons. In some cases fluorinated carboxylic acids and silicones may provide a lower initial coefficient of friction, but their weaker lateral interaction sometimes results in a less durable surface film that melts at a lower temperature, ultimately resulting in less overall protection. If a polar lubricant can form a direct chemical bond to the surface, as in the formation of metal soaps, even better results can be expected. 

A belief that solid interfaces are easier to understand than liquid ones shifted emphasis to the former but the subjects are not really separable, and the advances in the one are giving impetus to the other. There is increasing interest in films of biological and of liquid crystalline materials because of the importance of thin films in microcircuitry (computer chips ), there has been in recent years a surge of activity in the study of deposited mono- and multilayers. These Langmuir-Blodgett films are discussed in Section XV-7. 

Fabrication. Flexible packaging materials may be mono- or multilayer. Monolayer materials are usually films that have been produced by polymer resin melting and extmsion. 

Free mono- and multilayer films may be adhesive- or extmsion-bonded in the laminating process. The bonding adhesive may be water- or solvent-based. Alternatively, a temperature-dependent polymer-based adhesive without solvent may be heated and set by cooling. In extmsion lamination, a film of a thermoplastic such as polyethylene is extmded as a bond between the two flat materials, which are brought together between a chilled and backup roU. 

State-of-the-art TOF-SIMS instruments feature surface sensitivities well below one ppm of a mono layer, mass resolutions well above 10,000, mass accuracies in the ppm range, and lateral and depth resolutions below 100 nm and 1 nm, respectively. They can be applied to a wide variety of materials, all kinds of sample geometries, and to both conductors and insulators without requiring any sample preparation or pretreatment. TOF-SIMS combines high lateral and depth resolution with the extreme sensitivity and variety of information supplied by mass spectrometry (all elements, isotopes, molecules). This combination makes TOF-SIMS a unique technique for surface and thin film analysis, supplying information which is inaccessible by any other surface analytical technique, for example EDX, AES, or XPS. 

Finally, there is another category of lubricants, including the laminated materials, highly ordered organic mono-layers, and various thin solid hlms, which provides effective lubrication via their properties of low shear strength or high wear resistance. Lubrication via ordered molecular films and other solid lubricants, which have been considered by some investigators as a sub-discipline of boundary lubrication, will be discussed more specifically in Section 4. 

Phase transitions in surface pressure-area (tt - A) isotherms of Langmuir mono-layers of various film materials have been the subject of numerous investigations... 

Mono- and diphosphonium halides have been found to be flame retardants for plastic materials. Their effectiveness can be related to the formation of various active phosphorus compounds, as well as to many of the postulated mechanisms for flame retardant action. The compounds are postulated to be effective because they decompose on ignition to thermally stable phosphine oxides or phosphonic acids which, in turn, are decomposed to continuous films of phosphate glass. In addition, the phosphonium halides form alkyl halides which cool the flame and/or form halogen acids which are fame retardants. 

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