Surface Modification Of Polypropylene Non-woven Fabric Using Dielectric Barrier Discharge Plasma At Atmospheric Pressure

Polypropylene (PP) has been widely used in various fields of industry because of its excellent mechanical properties, such as light weight, low cost and readily-recyclable characteristics. PP is often unsuitable to use in many fields, such as painting and coating, because of its poor wettability and dyability due to its inherent low surface energies. Therefore, surface modification is necessary to improve its surface hydrophilic properties. The surface modification of PP materials by plasma is a clean and efficient processing, which has huge market potential and development prospects. Furthermore, surface modification using atmospheric pressure dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma has been actively investigated by many researchers recently. In this paper, PP no-woven fabric is studied using DBD at atmospheric pressure in order to improve its surface energy and hydrophilic property, and the mechanism of surface modification is discussed.In this paper, modification of the surface properties of PP no-woven fabric is studied using air, He and N2 dielectric barrier discharge plasma at atmospheric pressure respectively, which results are examined by contact angle measurement, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared attenuated total reflection (FTIR-ATR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The emission spectrum in the N2 dielectric barrier discharge plasma is discussed when the PP sample is put in the discharge space or not; the effects on the modification of PP surface are further studied by adding O2 and CO2 to N2 plasma; the time effectiveness of the PP samples after N2 DBD plasma treatment is investigated when the PP samples are exposed in the air; The results show that the surface hydrophilic property of the PP samples is greatly improved treated by plasma for a few seconds, as evidenced by the fact that the contact angle of the treated PP samples significantly decreases; there exist some physics processes, such as adhesion, etching, and fracture on the PP surface after atmospheric N2 DBD plasma treatment; there are many hydrophilic groups introduced on the surface of PP non-woven fabric after DBD plasma treatment, which is one of the reason that the hydrophilic property is improved; the time effectiveness of the treatment effect by atmospheric N2 DBD plasma is poor, and the hydrophilic property of the plasma treated PP samples decrease a little after exposing in the air for a long time.