Overview on modern vacuum web coating technology

Vacuum coatings on web shaped materials are covering a wide range of applications from decorative coatings and barrier coatings for the packaging industry, capacitor film coating for the electronics industry and coatings for magnetic tape up to different functional coatings with specially tailored mechanical, chemical, optical, electrical or magnetic properties. Depending on the application, processes like evaporation from resistance heated boats, electron beam evaporation, magnetron sputtering and plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition are used. Concepts and dimensions of different vacuum web coating systems are optimized for the applications and processes. In this paper a hardware description of different web coaters is given along with information about some typical processes. We show, that modern vacuum web coaters are the appropriate production tools for metallized web with two-dimensional patterns of nonmetallized areas for the production of capacitors, metallized web or paper for the packaging industry, transparent barrier coatings for packaging, multilayer window films with precisely defined optical properties and a lot of different other coated products.