Soap-film coating: High-speed deposition of multilayer nanofilms

Renyun Zhang,Mattias Andersson,Magnus Hummelgård,Sverker Edvardsson,Håkan Edlund,Henrik A Andersson,Niklas Johansson,Britta Andres,Per Edström,Martin Olsen,Håkan Olin,Sven Forsberg,Magnus Norgren,Hans-Erik Nilsson,Tetsu Uesaka,Thomas Öhlund,Kristoffer Karlsson

doi:10.1038/srep01477

Abstract

The coating of thin films is applied in numerous fields and many methods are employed for the deposition of these films. Some coating techniques may deposit films at high speed; for example, ordinary printing paper is coated with micrometre-thick layers of clay at a speed of tens of meters per second. However, to coat nanometre thin films at high speed, vacuum techniques are typically required, which increases the complexity of the process. Here, we report a simple wet chemical method for the high-speed coating of films with thicknesses at the nanometre level. This soap-film coating technique is based on forcing a substrate through a soap film that contains nanomaterials. Molecules and nanomaterials can be deposited at a thickness ranging from less than a monolayer to several layers at speeds up to meters per second. We believe that the soap-film coating method is potentially important for industrial-scale nanotechnology.

Highlights

The coating of thin films is applied in numerous fields and many methods are employed for the deposition of these films
This latter coating resembled that obtained with the Langmuir–Blodgett method, and the entire class of materials compatible with this method might subsequently be addressed using the soap-film coating (SFC) method, at least if a higher degree of defects is tolerable in the coated films
The different types of materials that were investigated (Fig. 2), to understand the limitations of the SFC method, showed that the method was quite general, from organic to inorganic materials may be used, as long as the particles mix or the molecules dissolve in the surfactant solution

Summary

Introduction

The coating of thin films is applied in numerous fields and many methods are employed for the deposition of these films. Previous efforts in the paper industry[14,15,16] to utilise foam for coatings have been reported, and this application has recently garnered renewed interest[17], such as in the foam coating of silica nanoparticles onto paper[17] In this foam-coating technique, the entire foam is spread onto the substrate and allowed to dry, whereas in the SFC method, the soap film or bubbles are instead penetrated by the www.nature.com/scientificreports substrate. The single film SFC method does not appear to have attracted any previous attention, previous works have described methods that resemble the SFC method, such as studies on attaching an entire soap bubble to a substrate[18] or using polymer bubbles for the ordering of carbon nanotubes[19]; these methods cannot be implemented for large-scale coatings

Methods

Results

Conclusion