Surface Modification Of Polymers Using Short Pulse Flashlamps

a The use of excimer lasers to produce surface modification of polymers has been known for some time. this area has been directed, however, toward the use of laser energy densities high enough to ablate material from the polymer surface for etching or texturing applications.2-6 These processes are generally quite costly to perform and usually do not find application where it is desired to modify large surface areas at high process speeds In this paper we describe our work using excimer lasers and short pulse flashlamps to disorder the surface region of oriented, semicrystalline polymers without material ablation from the polymer surface. This lower energy surface modification phenomenon is potentially much less costly than ablation and provides an industrially useh1 process for controlling the surface properties of polymers. Most of the work in