Improved Coating Adhesion on Polymers with Novel Laser Machining Pre-Treatment

Electroplating on polymer substrates, which provides polymers with enhanced mechanical properties, extended component lifetimes, and offers a decorative appearance, is environmentally unsustainable. Laser machining, a green process developed at Cirrus Materials Science Ltd, generates an array of pores on various polymer surfaces, which replaces the chemical etch process, and provides strong adhesion for metal coatings to polymer substrates. Laser machining is also applicable to a wide range of engineered or industrial polymer substrates and is adaptable to complex shapes and 3D printed parts. This paper discussed the process of laser machining of polymer substrates including the properties of metal layers on such machined surfaces; and demonstrated laser machining as a promising substitute for conventional chemical etching to prepare various engineering polymer substrates for adhesive coatings.

Modeling and Recipe Optimization of Anti-Glare Process Using Sandblasting for Electronic Display Glass

Recently, anti-glare (AG) surface treatment technology has been considered as a standard process to enhance the visibility of electronic display devices. For AG, the hydrofluoric acid (HF)-based chemical etch method is the most common approach for the current display glass industry. However, in order to overcome the environmental and durability degradation problems of the HF-based chemical etch method, this paper proposes an eco-friendly physical surface treatment technology using the sandblasting method. Based on the preliminary analysis results using the central composite design (CCD) method-based response surface modeling methodology (RSM), additional experiments and analyses were performed for process modeling and optimal process recipe generation. To characterize the sandblasting process, the mean value of haze was considered as the process output, and the pressure of the nozzle, the distance of the nozzle from the surface of glass, the glass feed rate, and the grit size of the abrasives were considered as process inputs. Based on the process model using the statistical response surface regression method and machine learning-based approaches, the proposed method can generate optimized process recipes for various haze targets of 10%, 20%, and 30%, with an average haze difference of 0.84%, 0.02%, and 0.86%, and maximum deviations of 1.26%, 1.14%, and 1.4%, respectively. Through the successful completion of this work, it is expected that the proposed surface treatment method can be applied to various products including mobile phones, tablet PCs, and windshields of vehicles.

A Novel Nanoimprint Lithography Thiol-ene Resist for Sub-70 nm Nanostructures

In this paper, we propose a novel kind of UV click-polymerization thiol-ene copolymers as nanoimprint lithography resists for sub-70 nm resolution patterns. High-precision mold imprint and release are two of the most critical steps of nanoimprint lithography, which requires the resists with properties of excellent conformal replication and low surface energy. Conventional UV-curable resists used in nanoimprint lithography, such as acrylate, epoxy resin, and vinyl ether, cannot satisfy all these properties requirements because they exhibit surface oxygen inhibition during polymerization, or materials fracture and delamination during mold releasing. A novel kind of thiol-ene copolymers have been investigated in this study, which have many properties favorable for use as nanoimprint lithography resists to imprint sub-70 nm and high-aspect-ratio nanostructures. These properties include sufficiently low viscosity and high Young's modulus, low surface energy for easy demolding, polymerization in benign ambient, and in particular, high chemical-etch resistance. These excellent properties give improve nanoimprinting results.