Grafting on polypropylene's pores using the residual sites produced by swift heavy ions

R.O. MAZZEI; G. GARCÍA BERMÚDEZ; V.C. CHAPPA; M.F.DEL GROSSO

Alemania

Simposio; Sixth International Symposium on Swift Heavy Ions in Matter, SHIM 2005; 2005

Radiation graft polymerization is one of the methods to obtain polymers with new properties. Until recently, only conventional radiation sources such as ã-rays and electron beams were used. At present, ion accelerators have become available for materials science research. Poly(propylene) (PP) foils were irradiated with Ag ions at 105 MeV of energy. Then they were chemically etched during different times to produce nuclear track membranes (NTM) with submicroscopic pores. The foils were carefully washed in distillate water and dried until constant weight before the grafting procedure. The active sites belonging to the residual latent track, after the etching procedure, were used to graft acrylic acid. Curves of the grafting yield as a function of the swift heavy ion fluence were obtained with the etching time as a parameter between 10 and 90 min. Characterization of the pores before grafting was achieved by transmission electron microscopy using the replica method. The grafting yields were determined, as a function of ion fluence and etching time, by weight measurements and also analysed using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Both measurements suggest that the acrylic acid was grafted on the pore wall of the NTM using the active sites left by the ion beam.