Slot Die Coating Head Design
Slot Die Coating (Extrusion Coating) Technology
Our research series Slot-Die heads are a piece of state-of-the-art coating equipment. Each coating head has been designed to fulfil the need for professional Slot-Die coating components. Produced from some of the hardest steel in the world, the material undergoes meticulously proces-ses to provide stable and ultra-precise accuracy. Slot Die Coating (Extrusion Coating) Technology Slot die coating technology is used to deposit a variety of liquid chemistries onto glass, stainless steel, and plastic substrates for the development and production of a broad range of applications. This is achieved through the precise metering the process fluid and dispensing it at a controlled rate while.
nTact’s Slot Die Coating systems and technology allows for efficient, high performance spinless coating for applications such as flat panel displays (including LCD, OLED, flexible, and others), photovoltaic panels (such as CIGS, CdTe, OPV, and others), Solid State Lighting (OLED and LED), and various Organic and Printed Electronic applications such as RFID, Polymer Batteries, Sensors and others.
DOI: 10.7473/EC.2013.48.4.282 Corpus ID: 136894676. Coater Die Design and Coating Quality Evaluation in the Machine Direction of Slot Coating Through Computer Simulation.
Advantages and features of nTact’s Slot Die Coating Technology include:
- Able to Coat Organic or Inorganic Liquids on flexible or rigid substrates
- Excellent coating uniformity (typically ±3% or better)
- Capable of coating a wide range of process materials: high and low viscosity fluids
- Deposit a wide range of thicknesses: from 20nm to >150μm
- High efficiency / high material utilization: typically 95% process material utilization
- Technology proven scalable from small R&D to large panel, high volume/mass production
- Systems available from R&D to large systems for production of panels over 2,000mm wide
- Highly reliable and robust process: up to 95% yields in high volume production environments
- High throughput (low TACT) processing
- Size of the system footprint is relatively small compared to competing technology platforms
- Technology applicable to roll-to-roll processing
Film Thickness Uniformity of Slot Die Coated HIL
Coated with nTact Coating System
200nm HIL, 1.6% Uniformity on 6×6” substrates*
* Optimized process and HIL formulation
Coating Matters: Slot Die Coating Fundamentals
- Published: July 01, 2011, By By Mark Miller Contributing Editor
Recently, a lot has been asked of coating technology. Products in the printed electronic fields, such as solar panels and battery technology, have pushed the limits of traditional roll-to-roll processes.
For a production facility to have a technical edge, a coating solution must be robust enough to coat thin, precise, and clean. Slot die coating technology provides this accurate and metered technology in a closed process for better control.
Here is a summary of the extent of capability of a slot die (for typical coating fluids):
- Line speeds 1-600 mpm
- Wet thickness coated 1-2,000 microns
- Viscosity of fluid 1-100,000 cP
- Accuracy ±1%
- Process uses Dual-sided coating, multiple layer coating, intermittent coating, lane coating
If slot die technology is so great, what is it? Slot dies are defined as premetered coating equipment, because all the fluid you send to the slot die gets coated on the web. But let's start at the beginning.
Let's say you have a special sauce that you want coated on a substrate, but the special sauce is really special. Thousands of dollars special! You can't afford to make enough of your sauce to fill a coating pan (open to the atmosphere) and have a traditional roll coating method slather the sauce onto the web for a trial and then throw away the rest.
What you would prefer — and the slot die technology provides — is a closed system that moves your special sauce from an enclosed tank through a pump to the slot die. The speed of delivery of the pump matches the web speed of the substrate, which allows whatever is sent to the slot die to be deposited on the web to form your product.
When you need to stop making your product, the pump is shut off and the wasted fluid is what remains in the pump, hose, and slot die.
So how much volume is in the slot die? That depends on the internal design or the manifold.
The manifold of the slot die is designed for the rheological family of fluids you will be running through the coating head. In other words, don't expect an adhesive slot die to run anode battery slurry. That would be like asking a smart car to haul cargo like a truck — different design and different results.
The manifold of the slot die is the internal distribution chamber that the fluid uses as a roadmap to distribute correctly onto the web to make your product. This manifold design is one of the five main characteristics that are important in slot die coating. The other four include lip geometry, lip offset, lip adjustability, and manufacturing tolerance.
As you can see, of the five main variables associated with slot die coating, three concern the lip or exit of the slot die. This exit is critical for many reasons but most importantly because the lips of the slot die are the last surface the fluid touches before wetting out onto the web. If the lip surface is not manufactured to an exacting tolerance, the fluid will “remember” the imperfections as defects in coating.
So if your new product development requires coating thin, precise, and clean fluids for value-added product design, I suggest investigating slot die coating. Precision-manufactured equipment provides you with the technology and adaptive coating techniques required for novel product development.
An example of slot die coating equipment includes this Ultracoat V adjustable lip slot die and support system from Extrusion Dies Industries, Chippewa Falls, WI.
Roll-to-roll coating industry expert Mark Miller, owner of Coating Tech Service, has 14+ years of slot die coating experience and troubleshooting. Contact him at 612-605-6019; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; www.coatingtechservice.com.
Slot Die Coating Head Designs
