Spin coating of an evaporating polymer solution

We consider a mathematical model of spin coating of a single polymer blended in a solvent. The model describes the one-dimensional development of a thin layer of the mixture as the layer thins due to flow created by a balance of viscous forces and centrifugal forces and evaporation of the solvent. In the model both the diffusivity of the solvent in the polymer and the viscosity of the mixture are very rapidly varying functions of the solvent mass fraction. Guided by numerical solutions an asymptotic analysis reveals a number of different possible behaviours of the thinning layer dependent on the nondimensional parameters describing the system. The main practical interest is in controlling the appearance and development of a skin on the polymer where the solvent concentration reduces rapidly on the outer surface leaving the bulk of the layer still with high concentrations of solvent. In practice, a fast and uniform drying of the film is required. The critical parameters controlling this behaviour are found to be the ratio of the diffusion to advection time scales epsilon, the ratio of the evaporation to advection time scales delta and the ratio of the diffusivity of the pure polymer and the initial mixture exp(-1/gamma). In particular, our analysis shows that for very small evaporation with delta << exp(-3/(4 gamma))epsilon(3/4) skin formation can be prevented. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3643692]