Labelling techniques for the chemical analysis of polymer surfaces

The labelling of functional groups for the surface analysis of polymers has been developed to become a useful tool. We briefly review examples which show the power improvement of a number of instrumental techniques for the analysis of chemically complex surfaces. The application of labelling techniques to some real‐world samples is demonstrated with some examples. The relation between labelling for XPS and for a fluorescence determination is shown with an oxygen plasma treated polyethylene. It was reacted with diaminoethane (DAE) and with fluorescamin or with dansyl hydrazine. The sensitivity of the fluorescence labelling is about two orders of magnitude higher. The robustness of the fluorescence labelling technique is shown by an orthogonal coupling. The subsequent coupling of two types of dyes to two different functional groups does not influence the fluorescence intensity of each dye. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.