Coating - Aimcal

Executive Summaries • A Look Ahead
vacuum Deposition
Considering the general economic gloom, I look back
over the last 12 months and am excited about the
developments that entered the roll-to-roll, vacuumdeposition
marketplace which, I am sure, will provide and
improve products for many years to come.
In metallizing, it has been tough but, even so, the global
consumption of metallized film has increased. Similar to
recent years, India, China, South America and Russia
are higher-growth regions, with north America and
Europe being static or very low growth. Even in areas
with sluggish markets, there are sectors of larger growth.
The biggest of these uses metallizers for the production
of transparent barrier films. The perceived wisdom was
that adding oxygen to aluminum metallizers would create
problems, and it was impossible to produce transparent
aluminum oxide in this way. Years ago, one company
quietly challenged this wisdom, modified a metallizer
and, some years ago, began producing transparent
barrier material. The big change has been that a couple
of machine suppliers have developed systems with a
turnkey process to produce transparent aluminium-oxide
barrier coatings. This year saw the first of these systems
delivering material into the market.
Using an in-vacuum polymer-deposition process, coating
onto the polymer before or after the metallization or both
has gained renewed interest. Previously, the only way of
depositing the polymer was by feeding monomer in from
outside the vacuum system, vaporizing the monomer,
condensing the vapor on the substrate and curing it.
The change this year was the news that one company
simplified the deposition using in-vacuum printing capable
of depositing polymers either pre- or post-deposition of
the aluminum.
104 | 2012 AIMCAL SourceBook
Both of these process developments look to offer plenty
of potential for opening up new markets in the future,
as they both appear to be cost-competitive technology
improvements.
Looking further to the future is the use of atomic layer
deposition for the production of barrier coatings. This
technology is well understood for coating discrete
substrates, and so the chemistry and process is well
developed. Laboratory-scale roll-to-roll systems have
been built with a variety of technological solutions. I would
expect that over the next year these will yield results that
will guide someone to produce a specification for a larger
pilot-production system to be built within the next two
years.
Sputtering or the high added-value coating markets over
the year have appeared somewhat more erratic. What
hit the headlines was the failure of some of the thin-film
photovoltaic companies. The PV market is bound to be
volatile as it is growing so rapidly during a time of global
economic instability. Governments starting and stopping
feed-in tariffs have made this market even less stable.
What it has not changed is the underlying trend that the
PV market continues to grow rapidly. The result has been
that companies that planned for smooth growth have had
to adapt their strategy. Thus expansion is delayed for a
time to react to the dip in growth. This is only a delay, and
substantial growth will return and continue for many years
to come. n
By charles A. Bishop, Ph.D., president, c.A. Bishop
consulting, Ltd., +44-1509-502076, email: cabuk8@
btinternet.com