Versatile wet deposition techniques for functional oxide coatings

Functional oxide coatings are essential components in a variety of today's technical products and developments, but often applications are limited by the low flexibility and the high cost of the vapor phase deposition techniques used at present. Wet chemical processes based on the sol-gel and nanoparticle approaches can provide desired alternatives for a large number of such applications. This is shown for the high temperature sol-gel processing and the low-temperature nanoparticle approach with a focus on transparent conducting oxides (TCO). The paper presents recent developments realized at the Institute for New Materials (INM) in the field of thin film deposition including the inside coating of cavities such as tubes in optical quality using a modified dip coating equipment as well as the coating of complex shaped substrates and the high-throughput coating of large area flat glasses using a spray technology. Moreover the use of functional crystalline nanoparticles allows now to apply thick coatings or patterns with elaborate functionalities on temperature sensitive substrates like plastics and pre-shaped glass parts by U-V-curing at low temperature. The concept is exemplified for transparent conducting ITO coatings. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.