Plasma is a distinct state of matter created by applying heat or high voltages to a gas resulting in ionization. Atoms, ions, electrons, free radicals, molecules as well as photons are the resulting activated species. These activated species interact with material surfaces and can be used to clean, activate (wet out), sterilize, oxidize, and chemically functionalize.
Plasmas can also be used as a medium in the deposition of ultra-thin films for creating permanent states of hydrophilicity or super hydrophobicity. Hydrophilic is generally considered having a water contact angle under 30 degrees and super hydrophobic having a water contact angle over 120 degrees.
Traditionally, vacuum plasma has been used in the semiconductor industry for the purposes described above. More recently, atmospheric plasma (or atmospheric pressure plasmas) have been developed for applications where the form factor limitations of a vacuum chamber (due to size or material lengths) and in-line processing requirements (vs. batch processing) are paramount.
What is atmospheric plasma? There are several types of atmospheric pressure plasma – torch, dielectric barrier discharge (dbd), corona and RF glow discharge. All atmospheric plasma technologies offer key advantages over vacuum plasmas such as:
- In-line processing
- Single part traceability
- Virtually form factor limitless
- Size, length, shape, morphology
- No chamber contamination
- No chamber location variances
- No moving parts (vacuum pumps)
- High reactive species density
All plasma technologies offer the advantages of non-contact surface preparation. This allows you the user to do away with either wet chemistries that are toxic and carry significant environmental health and safety issues (EH&S) or inconsistent manual abrasive techniques that are dirty and can result in product reliability issues.
Intrface Technologies is in a unique position to be able to offer several different types of atmospheric plasma technologies targeted to our expertise in solving cleaning, bonding, coating, functionalization and sterilization challenges.
With over 50 years combined experience in the electronics, medical device, semiconductor, composites and bio tech arenas, we have the applications knowledge base to solve your cleaning, bonding, coating or sterilization challenges.
Please contact us to discuss the specifics of your application so we can recommend a suitable atmospheric plasma technology solutions.