AVS 52nd International Symposium
    Plasma Science and Technology Tuesday Sessions
       Session PS+BI-TuM

Paper PS+BI-TuM1
Plasma Polymerisation of Ethanethiol

Tuesday, November 1, 2005, 8:20 am, Room 302

Session: Plasmas in Bioscience
Presenter: S.L. McArthur, University of Sheffield, UK
Authors: S.L. McArthur, University of Sheffield, UK
G. Mishra, University of Sheffield, UK
A.G. Shard, University of Sheffield, UK
Correspondent: Click to Email
The past years have seen significant development and use of functional polymer surfaces for bio-medical applications. Plasma polymerisation has proved to be one technique to generate functional surface in a single step process. Spontaneously reactive thiol surfaces produced by various wet chemistry routes have been extensively characterised as models to study surface-ligand interactions. This project aims to develop thiol functionalized surfaces utilizing plasma polymerisation of ethanethiol and with 1, 7 Octadiene as a diluent monomer. The deposited film properties were determined by X-Ray photoelectron spectroscopy and a fluorine marker was used to label any functional thiol groups present. It was observed that plasma polymerisation of ethanethiol at low discharge power resulted in a sulphur rich stable coatings and by increasing the power the coating resembled monomer composition in terms of atomic percentages, but none of the used conditions generated any detectable thiol groups. Mixing 1-7 Octadiene in a ratio of 1:1(v/v) in the gaseous feed resulted in an interesting change at high powers in the film properties with generation of 3-4% detectable active thiol groups without affecting the stability of the film. It is believed that the introduction of a diluent monomer at high powers has reduced the amount of available sulphur for crosslinking which dominates the deposition mechanism at low powers and has created a reaction pathway which favours the generation of thiol groups at the surfaces.