When manufacturing products, the coating technology is a key innovation driver for almost all areas of daily life - for example, for making scratch-proof displays for smart phones or anti-bacterial surfaces in refrigerators. Other coatings protect components from corrosion or aging, for example in a solar cell module or a car engine, without the end user noticing their existence. In industry today, wet chemical processes or vacuum plasma processes are primarily used for coating applications. Both have drawbacks. Vacuum units are expensive, limited to smaller components and applying a coating takes a relatively long time. Wet chemical processes often involve high resource and energy consumption with the corresponding environmental damage, and can also cause difficulties in the handling of material combinations for lightweight construction such as plastics/ metals or aluminum/steel.
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