Chemical Structure of EVA Films Obtained by Pulsed Electron Beam and Pulse Laser Ablation

Agata Niemczyk; Dariusz Moszyński; Roman Jędrzejewski; Konrad Kwiatkowski; Joanna Piwowarczyk; Jolanta Baranowska

doi:10.3390/polym11091419

Chemical Structure of EVA Films Obtained by Pulsed Electron Beam and Pulse Laser Ablation

Polymers (Basel). 2019 Aug 29;11(9):1419. doi: 10.3390/polym11091419.

Authors

Agata Niemczyk¹, Dariusz Moszyński², Roman Jędrzejewski³, Konrad Kwiatkowski⁴, Joanna Piwowarczyk⁵, Jolanta Baranowska⁵

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics, Institute of Materials Science and Engineering, West Pomeranian University of Technology, Szczecin, al. Piastow 19, 70-310 Szczecin, Poland. aniemczyk@zut.edu.pl.
² Faculty of Chemical Technology and Engineering, Institute of Inorganic Chemical Technology and Environment Engineering, West Pomeranian University of Technology, Szczecin, al. Piastow 42, 71-065 Szczecin, Poland.
³ Łukasiewicz Research Network - PORT Polish Center for Technology Development, ul. Stabłowicka 147, 54-066 Wrocław, Poland.
⁴ Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics, Department of Mechanics and Fundamentals of Machine Design, West Pomeranian University of Technology, Szczecin, al. Piastow 19, 70-310 Szczecin, Poland.
⁵ Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics, Institute of Materials Science and Engineering, West Pomeranian University of Technology, Szczecin, al. Piastow 19, 70-310 Szczecin, Poland.

Abstract

Poly(ethylene-co-vinyl acetate) (EVA) films were deposited for the first time using physical methods. The chemical structure of the films obtained using two techniques, pulsed electron beam deposition (PED) and pulsed laser deposition (PLD), was studied by attenuated total reflection Fourier infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Whilst significant molecular degradation of the EVA films was observed for the PLD method, the original macromolecular structure was only partially degraded when the PED technique was used, emphasizing the superiority of the PED method over PLD for structurally complex polymers such as EVA. Optical and scanning electron microscopic observations revealed compact and smooth EVA films deposited by pulsed electron beam ablation as opposed to heterogeneous films with many different sized particulates obtained by PLD.

Keywords: poly(ethylene-co-vinyl acetate), pulsed electron beam deposition, pulsed laser deposition, chemical structure analysis.