Preparation of a reticulated polyurethane foam grafted with poly(acrylic acid) through atmospheric pressure plasma treatment and its lysozyme immobilization.

We successfully introduced peroxide groups onto the surface of PU(Polyurethane) foam(10 PPI) through one atmospheric pressure plasma treatment and sequentially grafted PAAc(poly(acrylic acid)) on the surface of PU through radical copolymerization. The plasma treatment can generate large amount of peroxides on the surface of PU foam and the peroxide groups act as initiators for further grafting of PAAc in the monomer solution. To introduce large amount of peroxides on the surface of PU foam, we studied the effect of plasma rf-power and treatment time on the maximum grafting of PAAc. Through this study, we found that the optimum plasma treatment condition was the rf-power of 100 W and the treatment time of 100 s. On the other hand, we also studied the effect of graft reaction conditions such as temperature, monomer concentration and reaction time on the change of grafting degree (GD). The GD increased with increasing temperature and increased with reaction time before it leveled off at 3 h after reaction started. At low concentration of AAc, the GD was very low but it showed a maximum at the monomer concentration between 60 and 70%. The surface of the modified PU foam was qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed through the use of FT-IR and weight measurement, respectively. We also observed the surface change before and after plasma induced graft co-polymerization through photo and SEM analysis. Finally, we confirmed that the PU foams grafted with PAAc successfully immobilized lysozyme and other proteins from hen egg white.