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Atmospheric pressure nitrogen-based dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) jet with two-step plasma treatment procedure has been verified to be very effective in facilitating nitrogen-containing group incorporation on Polylactide (PLA) surface. It includes: 1) pretreatment plasma treatment by a nitrogen discharge with a trace amount of oxygen, and 2) ammonia plasma treatment by a nitrogen discharge with a small amount of ammonia. In this study, the optimized operation condition of two-step plasma procedure is investigated under different concentrations of added gases (0-1% oxygen; 0-10% ammonia). XPS analysis shows that ∼0.19 of N/C ratio can be achieved by means of the optimized two-step plasma procedures. Furthermore, a surface amination mechanism is proposed based on the observations of Optical Emission Spectra (OES), Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), and X-ray Photoelectron Spectra (XPS) analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we report the development of the fast incorporation of primary amine functional groups into a polylactide (PLA) surface using the post-discharge jet region of an atmospheric-pressure nitrogen-based dielectric barrier discharge (DBD). Plasma treatments were carried out in two sequential steps: (1) nitrogen with 0.1% oxygen addition, and (2) nitrogen with 5% ammonia addition. The analyses show that the concentration of N/C ratio, surface energy, contact angle, and surface roughness of the treated PLA surface can reach 19.1%, 70.5 mJ/m2, 38° and 73.22 nm, respectively. In addition, the proposed two-step plasma treatment procedure can produce a PLA surface exhibiting almost the same C2C12 cell attachment and proliferation performance as that of the conventional gelatin coating method. Most importantly, the processing/preparation time is reduced from 13-15 h (gelatin coating method) to 5-15 min (two-step plasma treatment), which is very useful in practical applications. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part A: 102A: 160-169, 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]