from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Biopolymers such as polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) occupy an important place in regenerative medicine and pharmacy and appropriate material treatment may contribute to application improvement and expansion. We have modified PHB foils by plasma treatment for the purposes of tissue engineering. The substrates were treated by high power plasma under different conditions (plasma power, time exposure and working gas). The applied plasma power was from 50 to 200 W and as a working gas argon and oxygen was employed. Another important part of the work was the investigation of surface changes caused by the plasma treatment. The changes of morphology were studied by AFM and SEM, and also the roughness and the contact angle were determined. It was observed that interesting formations with spongy structure visible on SEM scans were created by high power plasma modification. The treatment caused also the significant increase of roughness. The chemical analyses were performed by FTIR for the detection of new functional groups creation and XPS for the detection of surface element concentration.
Keywords: Polyhydroxybutyrate, plasma, nanostructuring, morphology, surface© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.