Hello everyone,
I often work with hydrogels and in many cases I have small pieces of plastic tubing embedded in the hydrogel. I am not very well versed in the terminology around this subject, but I would like to know how I can improve the "adhesive" force between the plastic and the hydrogel. I flow liquid through the tubing and I would like the space around the tubing to be as liquid-tight as possible, with the goal during flow conditions being unidirectional flow, and no backflow back out around the tubing. Since the hydrogel is mostly water, is what I'm asking an accurate description of what is possible? I am currently using perfluoroalkoxy (PFA) tubing in fibrin, transglutaminase-crosslinked fibrin-gelatin, and collagen hydrogel. We treat the PFA tubing with a concentrated solution of poly-L-lysine for several hours but I am not even sure if this is accomplishing anything since we have not thought of a way to test it.The PFA tubing is what we had on hand, but we would consider tubing of a different material or other chemical treatments. I would appreciate any comments or suggestion, as well as any references. Thank you!
I use oxygen plasma to improve adhesion to my glass and FR-4 substrates. It must work also for PFA
Surface modification like sand blasting, laser or plasma surface modification.
You could use a thin layer of agarose for fixing a piece of gel on plastic/glass surface if conditions of experiments allows it.
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