Abstract

Plasma treatment is often used to modify the surface properties of polymer films, since it offers numerous advantages over the conventional surface modification techniques. In this paper, a polypropylene (PP) film is plasma-treated using a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) operating in air at medium pressure (5.0 kPa). The modified polymer films are characterized using contact angle measurements, XPS-analysis and attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy. Results show that plasma treatment leads to a remarkable decrease in contact angle owing to the implantation of oxygen-containing functional groups. Using XPS and ATR-FTIR, these oxygen-containing groups can be identified as C-O, C=O and O-C=O. In this paper, it is also shown that XPS is well-suited to provide quantitative chemical analysis of the PIP films, while ATR-FTIR can only give qualitative information. To perform quantitative ATR-FTIR measurements, chemical derivatization will be explored in the near future. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.