Versatile wet deposition techniques for functional oxide coatings on glass

A wet chemical processing based on sol-gel materials or nanoparticles opens the entire spectrum of wet coating techniques for the deposition of functional oxide coatings. In practice, however, an adaptation of the deposition techniques and the coating solutions or dispersions is required to cope with the peculiarities of substrates and applications. Examples of recent developments in this field are shown for the deposition of transparent conducting oxide (TCO) coatings, which represent a class of materials of significant technological relevance for display applications and antistatics. A modified dip coating technique for the inside coating of glass tubes is presented, as well as the utilization of the spraying techniques for the manual or automated wet deposition on both shaped and large-area flat glass substrates. The employment of nanoparticles of indium tin oxide (ITO), moreover, paves the way to a most flexible and fast low-temperature processing of coatings. This way, not only tempered and pre-treated glass and plastic substrates can be coated, but also patterns can easily be realized.