Vetaphone and Coating Plasma Industrie to host EASI-Plasma Open House

Corona treatment specialist Vetaphone is to host an Open House event with Coating Plasma Industrie to detail the new EASI-Plasma system.

Vetaphone and Coating Plasma Industrie have established a technical and commercial partnership to develop EASI-Plasma, which they presented jointly at the ICE exhibition in Munich earlier this year.

Corona treatment was introduced by Vetaphone founder Verner Eisby in the middle of the last century, and is a widely used process for treating surfaces of polymer films and other substrates. Corona is an electric discharge controlled by a dielectric barrier (DBD) in air. The discharge is under the form of streamers statistically distributed over the surface. The objective of the treatment is to increase surface energies, and wettability and adhesion for gluing and printing.

However, on some materials the effects of corona treatment are limited and have a relative short life span. In the instances, plasma treatment can provide better results on these materials.

Enhanced atmospheric surface improvement (EASI) with plasma is also a DBD, sustained not in air but in a pure nitrogen atmosphere with or without small quantities of dopants gas such as H2 or N2O for functionalization and dopant monomers such as organosilicates for nanocoating.

EASI-Plasma is more homogeneous and “softer” than corona, Vetaphone said, with a lower heat impact on the surface, and enables the realization of a versatile controlled surface chemistry. Consequently it can be considered as a gas primer replacing both the use of corona treatment and a liquid primer.

By replacing the oxygen with gases or monomers, EASI-Plasma can create new abilities on the surface of films, such as higher and longer lasting dyne levels or nanocoating for hydrophobic or hydrophilic surfaces, so cutting costs and developing new products in the flexible packaging industry.

Vetaphone said EASI-Plasma will be the “next big thing” in surface modification

The Open House will take place at the facility of Coating Plasma Industrie in Peynier, France on September 10.

Read more about the pre-treatment of substrates here