Selective and low-E functional coatings

Selective and low-E functional coatings for membrane materials (PTFE/ETFE)... 

As for selective layers, low-E surfaces have also been commonly known for decades now and are standard, for example, in the glazing industry. However, both technologies are very new in the world of membranes. Transparent selective coatings and low-E surfaces on glass are commonly applied to layers which are enclosed inside insulation glazing units. These units are filled with dry air or even argon or krypton and therefore their interior presents an ideal protective environment to prevent the functional layers from corrosion. 

Thin solid films are layers that are present on a surface and have their top interface exposed to the environment Their extreme thinness in comparison with their lateral dimensions makes them systems that are infinite in two dimensions and are confined between an infinite gaseous phase and an infinite solid phase in the third one. As a result the global property of a layer is a combination of bulk and interface properties thus, one has to take into accoimt the thickness of the layer and the nature of the substrate when designing a coating for a specific application. Thin layers can be used for various purposes, depending on their surfece and/or bulk intrinsic properties. They can be dense, porous, patterned, multilayered, composite, and so on. Sol-gel films can be found in many different application domains such as optics (e.g., antireflection, self-cleaning, smart windows, and conductive transparent layers), electronics (e.g., microfabrication, low-/ , and self-assembled monolayers (SAMs)), protection (e.g., anticorrosion, anti-abrasion, and antistatic), and analysis (e.g., selective sensors). In most of these applications, the function must be identical on the whole surface of the substrate, and thus the thickness has to be controlled as much as possible and must be as uniform as possible. 

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