Surface energy tailoring of glass by contact printed PDMS

摘要

A simple contact printing method to modulate the surface wettability of glass employing poly(dimethyl)siloxane (PDMS) mold was investigated. PDMS is a well known material in microflu-idics and soft lithography for biomedical applications, being easy to process, low cost, biocompatible and transparent. Moreover its wettability can be tuned, by the exposure to oxygen plasma, UV-ozone or chemical oxidant solutions, or by surface functionalization. Unfortunately the effects of these treatments are not so stable in time. In this work a method to modify the surface energy (SE) of PDMS by changing its composition is proposed. Different mixing ratios (polymer base/curing agent) are analyzed evidencing that SE decreases while increasing the content of the polymer base, permanently modifying the surface behavior. As a thin layer of PDMS can be transferred to glass surfaces by contact printing, it is possible to locally change the wettability of glass simply patterning PDMS. In this work a SE patterning technique for glass surfaces by PDMS transfer is proposed. The technological process is based on the fabrication of PDMS molds by lift-off technique using Laser Direct Writing (LDW) lithography to process commercial photoresist. The transferring process for structures having a width of 10 μm was studied for a chosen PDMS composition, analyzing the surface energy of the patterned thin film by contact angle (CA) measurements.