What is Surface Treatment?
Surface Treatment
It is very important to bond plastic material to other plastic materials, or metal, or printed on a plastic surface.
To successfully complete this process, you need to make sure that liquid adhesive should moisten the surface of the material.
Therefore, technologies like Corona Treatment and Plasma Treatment are considered important to complete the process. Wettability is determined by one surface property: Surface energy is also known as surface tension.
Surface tension and surface energy are both measured in mN/m.
The surface energy of a solid substrate also directly impacts how effectively a liquid wets it.
Contact angle measurements, one by one, provide a simple way to verify wettability.
The contact angle is known as the angle formed by the tangent line at the contact point and the solid surface’s horizontal line.
Surface Wettability
Keep in mind that the greater the solid substrate’s surface energy with the liquid’s surface tension, the better its wettability will be and lower the contact angle.
The substrate’s surface energy is also required to surpass the liquid’s tension by around 2-10 mN/m to form a good bond between the liquid and the substrate surface.
Surface Energy of Solid Materials
Suppose you see a table that shows the absolute values of surface energy for solid materials.
In that case, you will find out that many plastics, such as polyethylene and polypropylene, have inadequate surface tension for printing and binding.
Chemical inertness, low coefficient of friction, high wear, puncture and tear resistance, and other qualities make these materials extremely valuable.
Read more on the different types of surface treatment procedures.
