Atmospheric-Pressure Non-thermal Plasma-JET effects on PS and PE surfaces

The Atmospheric-Pressure Non-Thermal Plasma (APNTP) has become a topic of a great interest for a wide spectrum of applications in different industry branches, including the surface of treatment processes. In this work we evaluate the effect of an argon APNTP exposure to determine changes suffered by a polystyrene (PS) and polyethylene (PE) polymer surface through RAMAN spectroscopy and SEM. It was determined that the hydrophilic change in energetic terms, i.e. surface activation in the PS and PE polymers is addition of oxygen by surface activation when the samples with jet plasma are exposed with the inert argon gas. It was possible to characterize the hydrophilic shift based on the change in intensity of the spectra.