By Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication
The films were created using the Biointerface Engineering Hub’s plasma reactor. The device produces thin films by fragmenting a selected molecule with a plasma and coating everything inside the reactor with it, including the desired surface. It’s possible to vary the chemistry of the film by changing the conditions within the reactor, and the thickness of the film can also be changed by controlling the deposition time. The versatility of the process also figures heavily in the group’s decision to use it – and also opens the method to the possibility of mass production. “There are a number of wet chemistry methods that can be used to create organic thin films but the advantage of plasma polymerisation is that, unlike other methods, deposition is substrate independent and can thus be used to coat a wide variety of samples,” explained Karyn Jarvis, a research engineer at ANFF-Vic’s Biointerface Engineering Hub who assisted the project. “There are some companies that have developed industrial scale plasma reactors to enable the coating of commercial quantities.”
