High-speed deposition of multilayer nanofilms using soap-film coating

• High-speed deposition of multilayer nanofilms using soap-film coatingRenyun Zhang, Henrik A. Andersson, Mattias Andersson, Britta Andres, Per Edström, Sverker Edvardsson, Sven Forsberg, Magnus Hummelgård, Niklas Johansson, Kristoffer Karlsson, Hans-Erik Nilsson, Martin Olsen, Tetsu Uesaka, Thomas Öhlund & Håkan OlinDepartment of Applied Science and Design, Mid Sweden University, SE-85170 Sundsvall, SwedenEmail: renyun.zhang@miun.se or hakan.olin@miun.seCoating1 of thin films is of importance for making functionalized surfaces with applications in many fields from electronics to consumer packaging. To decrease the cost, large scale roll-to-roll2 coating techniques are usually done at high speed, for example, ordinary printing paper is coated at a speed of tens of meters per second by depositing micrometer thick layers of clay. However, nanometer thin films are harder to coat at high speed by wet-chemical methods, requiring special roll-to-roll vacuum techniques3 with the cost of higher complexity.Here, we report a simple wet chemical method for high-speed coating of films down to molecular thicknesses, called soap-film coating (SFC)4. The technique is based on forcing a substrate through a soap film that contains nanomaterials. In the simplest laboratory version, the films can be deposited by a hand-coating procedure set up in a couple of minutes. The method is quite general molecules or nanomaterials or sub-micrometer materials (Figure 1) with thicknesses ranging from less than a monolayer to several layers at speeds up to meters per second. The applications of soap-film coating is quite wide an we will show solar cells, electrochromic devices, optical nanoparticle crystals, and nano-film devices. We believe that the soap-film coating method is potentially important for industrial-scale nanotechnology.Fig. 1. Soap film coating of nanoparticles, layered materials, nanowires, and molecules. a sub-monolayer 240 nm silica nanoparticle (scale bar 2 µm) b monolayer c double layer. d monolayer gold nanoparticles. e single layer TiO2 nanoparticles. f sub-monolayer polystyrene (scale 2 µm), g monolayer of polystyrene. h triple-layer of polystyrene. i monolayer of Ferritin.  j AFM image of <1.5 layer GO film (3 µm x 2 µm). k clay on glass (scale 2 µm). l SFC coated nanocellulose. m Absorbance spectra Rhodamine B on a glass slide. AFM of SDS layers n (2 µm x 1.5 µm) and o (20 µm x 15 µm).ReferencesTracton, A. A. Coating Technology Handbook (CRC Press, Boca Raton, 2006).Ohring, M. Materials science of thin films. (Academic press., 2001).Charles, B. Vacuum deposition onto webs, films and foils. (William Andrew, 2011).Zhang, R. Y., Andersson, H. A., Andersson, M., Andres, B., Edström, P., Edvardsson, S., Forsberg, S., Hummelgård, M., Johansson, N., Karlsson, K., Nilsson, H.-E., Olsen, M., Uesaka, T., Öhlund, T., Olin H. Soap film coating: High-speed deposition of multilayer nanofilms. Submitted.

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