Plasma deposition of antibacterial nano-coatings on polymeric materials

Non-woven textile materials with antimicrobial properties are of high demands for applications ranging from medical dressing to everyday cleaning products. A plasma assisted route to engineer antimicrobial nano-composite coatings is proposed. Nano-particles of Ag, Cu and ZnO are tested as antimicrobial agents with average nano-particle size of 20-50 nm. Nanoparticles are incorporated in between two layers of an organosilicon film. The effect of the barrier coating on nano-particles release is determined by XPS. Antibacterial efficiency of the samples against P. aeruginosa ATCC 9027 and S. aureus M u50 bacteria shows that all treated samples exhibit higher antibacterial efficiency against S. aureus. The antibacterial efficiency of AgNPs and CuNPs is above 90% which is practically interesting for medical application while ZnONPs shows lower antibacterial efficiency.This work is supported by the M.Era-Net project IWT 140812 “PlasmaTex”.