Time-resolved mass and energy spectral investigation of a pulsed polymerising plasma struck in acrylic acid

Study of the influence of the acrylic acid plasma parameters on silicon and polyurethane substrates using XPS and AFM

“…Ward et al [14] have already reported the thin film of poly(acrylic acid) formation on Nylon substrates through a controlled ultrasonic atomization of the AA monomer. In a recent study of pulsed plasma polymerization of AA [16] at 10 W, it was found that after the application of potential pulse, the protonated molecular ion m/z = 73 (AA monomer) decay faster than the lighter ions. A reasonable reason was the occurence of chain polymerization process.…”

“…The deposition of well-defined polymeric films of poly(acrylic acid) was obtained atomizing AA monomer in an ultrasonic nozzle by atmospheric pressure glow discharges [14]. Finally, in a series of interesting experiments, the dependence of the plasma gas phase composition on the external discharges parameters was studied in detail by using energy spectroscopy and mass spectrometry techniques [15,16].…”

Plasma Parameter Aspects in the Fabrication of Stable Amine Functionalized Plasma Polymer Films

“…Deposition rates were measured using a Sycon Instruments Quartz Crystal Microbalance with a gold 6 MHz crystal. An EQP 1 000 quadrupole mass spectrometer (Hiden Analytical, UK) was used to measure the positive ion and neutral mass distributions of selected plasmas . The entrance orifice was 100 μm in diameter.…”

Challenges in the characterization of plasma polymers using XPS

“…Mainly focused on vacuum plasmas, a growing number of studies using mass spectrometry (MS) to characterize the gas phase during plasma deposition of organic [25,[36][37][38] and inorganic [39][40][41][42][43] coatings as well as during plasma etching/ablation of polymer surfaces [44,45] can be found in the literature. The above-cited references attest that, although MS does not provide direct, unambiguous chemical information due to possible fragmentation in the ionization chamber, one can easily discern fragmentation and/or oligomerization phenomena as soon as (in)organic molecules (precursor or monomer) are subjected to plasma discharges.…”