Mo, Nov. 10, 8:40 AM BI+AS-MoM-2 Deposition of Porous Polyparylene Layers with Even Thickness in Narrow Tubes

Gerhard Franz, Hamideh Heidari (Munich University of Applied Sciences, Germany), Dieter Jocham (University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein at Luebeck)

To coat a thin hollow tube with an equally thick layer along the whole length, is one of the most challenging issues of surface refinement. Even for long mean free paths and large diffusion lengths, a drop in thickness is common, which is simply caused by the abstraction of deposited molecules, which cannot walk randomly any longer. To overcome these inherent spatial inhomogeneities, we made use of the mechanism of the temperature-dependent surface polymerization, which is manifested in the occurrence of a "ceiling temperature". Negatively turned, no deposition is possible beyond this temperature. Positively spoken, the spatially inhomogeneous deposition rate along a tube can be equalized with a counteracting temperature gradient. Experimentally, a configuration with four furnaces in line has been constructed which allows the inner wall of a tube 12" in length and 1/8" in inner diameter to be coated with a layer of even thickness. The most prominent application is the partial protection of thin silver layers which are deposited on the inner walls of catheters of polyurethane or polysilicone not as a contiguous film but with a zebra-stripe design applying a patent-pending procedure [1]. These silver rings act as antibacterial means to combat infections and induced incrustations in the urological area. To prolong the lifetime of the silver depot, it has to be protected with a porous human compatible top layer. We chose FDA approved polyparylene with thicknesses between 100 and 400 nm to ensure a long-term antibacterial activity, which should be kept above threshold level by a safety factor of 2 [2,3]. First results for the CVD of polyparylene are presented and are discussed and modeled with COMSOL in terms of diffusion laws with an abstraction reaction of 1st order. After having shown the antibacterial effect for a static case [4], here a dynamic trial is presented to simulate the antibacterial activity during flow of bacteria-containing urine in the ureters.

[1] G. Franz, F. Schamberger, A. Kutschera, S. Seyedi, D. Jocham, German patent disclosure DE 102012023349.3, Nov. 29, 2012

[2] F. Schamberger, A. Ziegler, and G. Franz, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B30, 01801 (2012)

[3] G. Franz, F. Schamberger, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A31, 061602 (2013)

[4] H. Heidari, St. Sudhop, F. Schamberger, G. Franz, Biointerphases, accepted May 05, 2014