Improved Coating Window for Slot Coating

Abstract

Slot die is a premetered coating operation in which the coating solution is extruded from a feed slot onto the surface of a substrate passing through. The defect-free region of operation is known as the “coating window”, and the wider it is, the more versatile the operation will be. The slot-coating experiments reported here were carried out with two types of coating solutions, a hard coating solution with low viscosity and a polysilica solution with high viscosity. The coating windows were measured as flow rates q versus minimum and maximum coating speeds, Vmin and Vmax, respectively. Therefore, at a given flow rate of the coating solution, there exists a minimum speed and a maximum speed that border the corresponding coating window, outside which coating defects occur. Also, in our experiments, the coating windows shifted to higher coating speed and obtained thinner coating film thicknesses through different settings of the die angle to the substrate and different geometries of die lips. The data showed that the coating windows shifted to higher speed and thinner film thicknesses when the die angle and the geometry of the die lips were varied appropriately. These results have important practical implications. The fundamental principles involved here are also applicable to other premetered coating processes.