Preparation of Sol−Gel Films by Dip-Coating in Extreme Conditions

Abstract

Dip-coating of sol−gel solutions is a complex dynamic process that is difficult to model because it is associated with time-dependent evaporation-induced concentration and viscosity gradients in the solution. It is, however, highly used in the coating technology because it is simple and provides excellent reproducibility. Existing fair models have been proposed some decades ago to describe this method, but they are based on Newtonian and nonevaporating liquids and require several important assumptions and simplifications. In this work, we present a simple experimental study of sol−gel film formation by dip-coating, through which we propose a general semiexperimental model to predict the final film thickness. Spectroscopic ellipsometry was used as the main technique to obtain the film physical thickness and optical density for various dip-coating processing conditions (withdrawal speeds from 0.01 to 20 mm·s −1 and temperatures from 25 to 60 °C) and for several different chemical solutions (TiCl 4, TEOS, and MTEOS, all in the presence, or not, of block PEO- b -PPO copolymer templates in EtOH/H 2 O, with concentrations from 10 −1 to 10 −3 mol·L −1 ). We show that phenomena that are difficult to assess during deposition, such as viscosity variation, evaporation cooling, chemical reaction, and thermal Marangoni flow, may not have to be taken into account. The influences of various experimental parameters are discussed together with the limitations and the full potentiality of the dip-coating technique. We show that two regimes of film formation independently exist at extreme withdrawal speeds, while they combine into a third regime at intermediate speeds. Although the first regime is well-known and is governed by gravity-induced viscous drag at higher speeds, the second one is barely used and is governed by interdependent evaporation and capillarity rise at lower speeds. We show that both regimes can be selected to build up films with a tunable thickness and that a minimum thickness exists for each given solution at a critical speed for which we believe that the capillarity rise effect perfectly counterbalances the viscous drag. We also show that the capillarity regime is well-suited when one needs to deposit thick films from highly diluted solutions.