Maba: New technical plant for coating flexible materials in the cleanroom

A test facility that can apply coatings under 100 nanometers thick evenly and losslessly onto flexible materials has been put into operation by Maba-Spezialmaschinen GmbH (www.maba-spezialmaschinen.de).

Within nine months, an investment of 250,000 euros resulted in a versatile coating system primarily for films and other plastic products, including dosing, conveyor technology, and drying systems. With a maximum processing width of 300 millimeters, it is used for producing samples and testing new liquid, functional coatings under cleanroom conditions. Very thin layers and lossless application are intended to significantly reduce costs.

The capillary coating technology was developed — which, in addition to precise dosing, offers the advantage over conventional methods of being able to apply reactive multi-component systems to surfaces at high processing speeds. This imparts new functions to the materials, such as printability, scratch resistance, or electrical conductivity. The range of functional layers is diverse: antibacterial packaging specialty films, holographic films, flat displays, flame-retardant plastic films, membrane technology, UV protection layers, biologically reactive layers, organic LEDs, and polarizers are among them.