Functional coatings from the plasma nozzle

When manufacturing products, the coating technology is a key innovation driver for almost all areas of daily life – for example, for making scratch-proof displays for smart phones or anti-bacterial surfaces in refrigerators. Other coatings protect components from corrosion or aging, for example in a solar cell module or a car engine, without the end user noticing their existence. In industry today, wet chemical processes or vacuum plasma processes are primarily used for coating applications. The IFAM team developed a new kind of plasma coating process that works at ambient pressure, that is to say, in an open atmosphere. "And that poses a major challenge", explains Jörg Ihde. "Because the pressure is more than 10,000 times higher and the absence of a vacuum reactor, we had to stop unwanted particles from forming and embedding in the coating. That was the key to developing robust and efficient industrial processes using the new plasma system


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