Our ARC Discovery Project (“Order from Chaos“) is aimed toward discovering how to improve polymer surface coatings — such as those that will be useful in advanced manufacturing of new materials. In the previous post, I discussed the discovery of how to make functional coatings from one chemical compound EBiB. Our latest published research describes a systematic investigation of three similar chemical compounds and is working towards establishing more general rules that could be applied more widely.

Using structurally-related esters, lead author Solmaz Saboohi found the plasma deposition could proceed either through the α regime (lower pressure, collisional) or through the γ regime (higher pressure, collisionless). Analysis of the plasma phase and the deposited films showed noticeable differences under either conditions and markedly different coatings produced.

This discovery is helping us to understand the deposition characteristics of small molecular weight esters, which will hopefully be extended and generalised towards other compounds in the future.

Results have been recently published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.

Link to article on publisher’s site.