I treated my two PDMS substrates with plasma and then tried to bond them together however, it was not successful! what operations should I do on them to be able to re-treat them with plasma again.
Whenever using O2 plasma to PDMS, the surface becomes hydrohilic. However this is temporarily, so you need to perform bonding directly after treatment. When the bonding is not succesful, you might consider a simple cleaning in ethanol in a sonicating bath, After drying in N2 you can expose the PDMS again to plasma for another bonding.
You might also consider to use one a thin not-fully cured PDMS intermediate layer. This will result in a much stronger bond.
What Daniel said is good advice but in principle I wouldn't reuse substrates at all as a lot of things (which you cannot acount for) may happen to them between the two treatments and thus alter your results. You might also loose reproducebility.
Hence, my advice would be to use new substrates in every experiment you do.
I fully agree with Daniel and Johannes. You should take into account that PDMS treated in an oxygen plasma shows a very fast hydrophobic recovery. To prevent this, bonding immediately after plasma treatment will be a good option. Alternatively you can try to store your sample in water which also interferes with hydrophobic recovery.
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