Surface energy change and hydrophilic formation of PE, PS and PTFE films modification by hydrogen ion assisted reaction

The Polyethylene (PE), Polystyrene (PS) and Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) surface modification was investigated by hydrogen io assisted reaction (H-IAR) in oxygen environment. The IAR is a kind of surface modification techniques using ion beam irradiation in reactive gas environment. The energy of hydrogen ion beam was fixed at 1keV, io dose was varied from 5$\times$1014 to 1$\times$1017 ions/$\textrm{cm}^2$, and amount of oxygen blowing gas was fixed 4ml/min. Wettability was measured by water contact angles measurement, and the surface functionality was analyzed by x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The contact angle of water on PE modified by argon ion beam only decrease from 95$^{\circ}$ to 52$^{\circ}$, and surface energy was not changed significantly. But, the contact angle using hydrogen ion beam with flowing 4ml/min oxygen stiffly decreased to 8$^{\circ}$ and surface energy to 65 ergs/cm. In case of PS, the contact angle and surface energy changes were similar results of PE, but the contact angle of PTEE samples decreased with ion dose up to 1$\times$1015 ions/$\textrm{cm}^2$, increased at higher dose, and finally increased to the extent that no wetting was appeared at 1$\times$1017 ions/$\textrm{cm}^2$. These results must be due to the hydrogen ion beam that cleans the surface removing the impurities on polymer surfaces, then hydrogen ion beam was activated with C-H bonding to make some functional groups in order to react with the oxygen gases. Finally, unstable polymer surface can be changed from hydrophobic to hydrophilic formation such as C-O and C=O that were confirmed by the XPS analysis, conclusionally, the ion assisted reaction is very effective tools to attach reactive ion species to form functional groups on C-C bond chains of PE, PS and PTFE.