Promotion of tribological and hydrophobic properties 1 of a coating on TPE substrates by atmospheric plasma-polymerization

Resumen

Thermoplastic elastomers (TPE) are used in the automotive sealing industry with the objective of producing anti-friction and hydrophobic components. At present, the anti-friction property is achieved by the electrostatic flocking, which sometimes produces an irregular coating. Therefore, this paper's objective is the promotion of adhesion of an anti-friction (based on the silane aminopropyltriethoxysilane-APTES-) and hydrophobic (based on the fluorinated precursor 1-perfluorohexene-PFH-) coating by the adhesion promoter, APTES. Different mixtures of APTES and PFH have been applied to a TPE substrate by an Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Jet (APPJ) system with Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) in order to determine the optimal mixture of precursors. The main difficulty in this work lies in the hydrophilic character of APTES and the low adhesion of the fluorinated coatings. The sample coated with a mixture of 50% APTES and 50% PFH (A50P50) was found to be the best one to satisfy both properties at the same time, despite not having the highest dynamic water contact angle (WCA) or the lowest friction coefficient. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.