Adhesion of polypropylene treated with nitric and sulfuric acid

The surface treatment of polyolefins to improve its adhesion capacity remains as an important field of research and several techniques are described in the literature. In this work, we are interested in the development of a method to obtain adherent polypropylene. In this way, we investigate the effect of nitric and sulfuric acid treatments onto polymer plates under various experimental conditions and measure the adhesive strength of the samples joined with leather using commercial polychloroprene. The experiments follow a factorial design and the results show an increase in the adhesivity of the material in comparison with untreated samples. The IR spectra of nitric acid treated samples change in relation to the original material, whereas sulfuric acid treatment does not affect the IR spectra.