Surface Morphological Modification of Crosslinked Hydrophilic Co-Polymers by Nanosecond Pulsed Laser Irradiation

GASTÓN A PRIMO ; CECILIA I ALVAREZ IGARZÁBAL ; GUSTAVO A PINO ; JUAN C FERRERO ; MAXIMILIANO ROSSA

APPLIED SURFACE SCIENCE

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2016 vol. 369 p. 422 - 422

0169-4332

his work reports an investigation of the surface modifications induced by irradiation with nanosecondlaser pulses of ultraviolet and visible wavelengths on crosslinked hydrophilic co-polymeric materi-als, which have been functionalized with 1-vinylimidazole as a co-monomer. A comparison is madebetween hydrogels differing in the base co-monomer (N,N-dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate and N-[3-(dimethylamino)propyl] methacrylamide) and in hydration state (both swollen and dried states).Formation of craters is the dominant morphological change observed by ablation in the visible at 532 nm,whereas additional, less aggressive surface modifications, chiefly microfoams and roughness, are devel-oped in the ultraviolet at 266 nm. At both irradiation wavelengths, threshold values of the incident laserfluence for the observation of the various surface modifications are determined under single-pulse laserirradiation conditions. It is shown that multiple-pulse irradiation at 266 nm with a limited num