Superhydrophilicity performs well in anti-fog and self-cleaning applications. In this study, polycarbonate substrate was used as the modification object because of the low surface energy characteristics of plastics. Procedures that employ plasma bombardment, such as etching and high surface free energy coating, are applied to improve the hydrophilicity. An organic amino silane that contains terminal amine group is introduced as the monomer to perform plasma polymerization to ensure that hydrophilic radicals can be efficiently deposited on substrates. Different levels of hydrophilicity can be reached by modulating the parameters of plasma bombardment and polymerization, such as plasma current, voltage of the ion source, and bombardment time. The surface of a substrate that is subjected to plasma bombarding at 150 V, 4 A for 5 min remained superhydrophilic for 17 days. After 40 min of Ar/O₂ plasma bombardment, which resulted in a substrate surface roughness of 51.6 nm, the plasma polymerization of organic amino silane was performed by tuning the anode voltage and operating time of the ion source, and a water contact angle < 10° and durability up to 34 days can be obtained.

An approximate growth model was employed to predict the time required to grow a graphene film by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Monolayer graphene films were synthesized on Cu foil at various hydrogen flow rates from 10 to 50 sccm. The sheet resistance of the graphene film was 310Ω/□ and the optical transmittance was 97.7%. The Raman intensity ratio of the G-peak to the 2D peak of the graphene film was as high as ~4 when the hydrogen flow rate was 30 sccm. The fitting curve obtained by the deviation equation of growth model closely matches the data. We believe that under the same conditions and with the same setup, the presented growth model can help manufacturers and academics to predict graphene growth time more accurately.

A novel direct current (DC) magnetron sputtering system via radio frequency (RF) bias with hexamethyldisiloxane (HMDSO) plasma polymerization was developed for the deposition of SiO_x-doped diamond-like carbon (DLC) films on a glass substrate. As the RF bias increased, the ratio of intensity of D peak and G peak (I(D)/I(G)) decreased and the G peak shifted to a low position, leading to high hardness and a large portion of sp³ bonds. Additionally, weak sp² graphite bonds were broken and sp³ diamond bonds formed because the RF bias attracted hydrogen ion bombarding the DLC films. Increasing DC power was helpful to improve the hardness of the DLC films because the proportion of sp³ bonds and the I(D)/I(G) ration was increased. HMDSO was introduced into this process to form SiO_x:DLC films with enhanced optical performance. The average transmittance in the visible region of these very thin SiO_x:DLC films with a thickness of 37.5 nm was 80.3% and the hardness of the SiO_x:DLC films was increased to 7.4 GPa, which was 23.3% higher than that of B270 substrates.