DESIGN DIP COATER FOR WET COATING TECHNOLOGY

WetCoating Technology is widely usedin industries nowadays. Dip coating is one of
the techniques used in Wet Coating Technology. The device required to implement
the technique is called dip coater. The conventional dip coating technique used to
deposit sol-gel thin films on flat substrates is well established and accepted because
of its simplicity and the high coating quality that can be obtained. Advanced Material
Research Centre (AMREC) SIRIM Berhad as a collaborator provided the dip coater
for the project. With the current dip coater, the thin=film produced has several
problems including wavy surfaces and non-uniformity of the thickness. The dip
coater control box is only limited to two speed controls which are 0.5 mm/s and
1.5 mm/s. The purpose of this project is to improve the performance ofAMREC dip
coater by designing a new improved dip coater. Preliminary work of the project
involved evaluatingthe performance of current dip coater by analyzing the coatings
produced using several characterization tools. Examination of how dip coating
process works lead to the identification of what causes thepoorquality of the coating.
Factors that contributed to the problems are vibration produced by the sample
movement and type of the motor choosen for the dip coater. It was found that the
vibration of the system can be reduced when the nut follower pitch was reduced.
Circuit of the system has been redesigned to allow the change of the motor
movement, control the speed and providing various speed for dipping process.