Wang, Hongfang2025-12-172025-12-172019https://hdl.handle.net/11541.2/1426081 ethesis (xxiv, 147 pages) :illustrations (some colour), colour charts.Includes bibliographical references.Like cream are often coated on cakes to make delicious cream cakes, thin polymer coatings are widely used for modifying base materials to achieve desirable performance such as repelling bacterial adhesions. For such layered systems, it is still uncertain how thin the coatings can be to fully mask the substrate influence, and why? From the aspect of force interactions, it is conceivable that long-range forces arising from the substrate can act through thin coatings, which is analogous to sunlight shining through thin cloud layers. In this thesis, plasma polymer coatings of various thicknesses were used to construct layered structures for quantative studies on the surface DLVO forces, both experimentally and theoretically, to understand the substrate effects.ensubstrate effects;DLVO surface forces;ultrathin plasma polymer filmsInterfaces (Physical sciences)Plasma polymerization.Thin filmsthesis