Plasma Surface Modification of Biodegradable Polymers: A Review

Abstract

Besides their use as packaging materials, biodegradable polymers can play a major role in tissue engineering as three‐dimensional porous structures (scaffolds). The success of these biodegradable scaffolds is, however, determined by the response it elicits from the surrounding biological environment and this response is governed, to a large extent, by the surface characteristics of the scaffold. Multiple approaches have been developed to obtain the desired surface properties, however, in the past decade, the use of non‐thermal plasmas for selective surface modification has been a rapidly growing research field. This paper therefore presents a critical overview on recent advances in plasma‐assisted surface modification of biodegradable polymers.

Cold atmospheric plasma manipulation of proteins in food systems

“…Previous studies show that, depending on the gas source of plasma, various functional groups such as carboxylic acid, amide bonds, and hydroxyl can be introduced to the surface of polymers (Desmet et al, 2009;Morent et al, 2011), which may eventually be effective in increasing the flexibility of the polymer. Oh et al (2016) suggest that elongation and oxygen barrier property of defatted soybean meal (DSM) film can increase, following plasma treatment for 15 minutes at 400 W. As a result, plasma exposure limited the oxygen availability in the DSM packaging film, resulting in the retardation of lipid oxidation of smoked salmon during storage at 4 C (Oh et al, 2016).…”

Surface, Thermal and Antimicrobial Release Properties of Plasma-Treated Zein Films

“…The DBD plasma is well known for the modification of both the surface and bulk properties of polymers [18]. The effects of plasma on polymeric materials have been reviewed by Morent et al [19] and Pankaj et al [20]. An increase in surface roughness was observed after plasma treatment in most of the packaging materials like low-density polyethylene [21], polypropylene [22], poly(ethylene terephthalate) [23] and poly(lactic acid) [24].…”

Tailored surface design of biodegradable endovascular implants by functionalization of poly (L-lactide) with elastin-like proteins

“…Within this study, we investigated three different surface activation treatments: a non-thermal treatment with ammonia plasma (NH 3 -plasma) [35] , aminolysis with HMDA [36] and a combination of an oxygen plasma (O 2 -plasma) treatment and silanization with APTES [37] . It is well known that plasma treatment is restricted to the surface with a very low penetration depth of only 10 nm [35] , while aminolysis has been reported to occur as deep as 50 µm [36] , and silanization often yields multilayer formation due to condensation of hydrolyzed silanol groups between each other [38] . Hence, one might assume a considerable higher density of amino groups on aminolyzed and silanized PLLA, which we could indeed evidence in a previous study [32] .…”