New applications of ion assisted reaction for hydrophilic surface modification: medical, electronic and packaging

Summary form only given, as follows. Ion Assisted Reaction (IAR) is the unique surface modification technology, which could change almost all polymer surface into hydrophilic one. Recently, new application fields using IAR technology are developed, which are medical, electronic, and packaging applications. Firstly, there is Petri-dish for cell culturing as the medical application of IAR. From the results of PC12 cell culturing, the cells on IAR-treated polystyrene (PS) Petri-dishes remain and grow well, while for the groups of untreated Petri-dishes, after one day of seeding, most of the cells are not attached to the surface and a few cells survive. Secondly, IAR technology can be applicable to adhesiveless flexible copper clad laminate(FCCL) for electronic application. Adhesion between Cu layer and polyimide (PI) in adhesiveless FCCL is the most important property and need tobe improved. XPS analysis of the surface of PI treated by IAR shows that the hydrophilic groups are newly created, resulting in increasing the surface energy and the adhesion between overlayer and treated PI. Third application of IAR to describe in this paper is gas diffusion layer for flexible packaging. The adhesion and permeability are strongly depends on the structure of the interface between the polymer and the barrier. In addition, two types of mass production system using IAR modification are introduced in this paper, which are in-line continuous system and cassette feed-in system. Characteristics of these systems are discussed in terms of efficiency and productivity.