Impact of IR-irradiation as powerful curing method to obtain crack free coating for sol-gel derived coating materials

摘要

An important area of sol-gel chemistry is the production of coatings. For the majority of sol-gel systems, a thermal treatment of the deposited solution (sol) is necessary to obtain cured coatings. In addition to the evaporation of the used solvents crosslinking of the material has to be initiated by condensation reactions during the curing process. These processes are typically achieved by thermal treatment in convection ovens. In order to obtain crack free coatings the thermal power as well as the curing time are the most important parameters. Infrared irradiation is an interesting alternative annealing technique, which can be used to decrease the curing time significantly. This impact of using IR-emitters was tested for two model different sol-gel systems: (ⅰ) a bridged organic-inorganic hybrid precursor 1 (figure 1) and (ⅱ) methyltriethoxysilane CH_3Si(OC_2H_5)_3 (MTEOS) based coatings.