Electrically Heated Aramid Paper: Magnetron Sputtering Silver Materials Coating Technique
Introduction
Aramid Paper is a high-temperature resistant insulation product with an excellent balance of physical and electrical properties.
The material I'm going to share with you today is Aramid Paper. It is a bulletproof material used in the defense industry to produce body armor, bulletproof helmets and other equipment. However, its production process is very complex, the production of raw materials is difficult to control as well.
Why Aramid Paper So Important
Some special purpose Aramid Paper can be used in the future in more fields such as medical treatment. Why is this a breakthrough we think? Because Aramid Paper is a coveted material in many industrial fields, Aramid Paper’ performance is really excellent, a meter wide of thin Aramid Paper, can pull a car away. Not only high strength, but also high temperature resistance characteristic, not easy to burn, chemical corrosion resistance, blister resistance, electric shock resistance, but also not easy to deformation.
As a result, it has long been used in advanced equipment such as rockets and aircraft carriers, as well as rail transit such as high-speed trains.
It is "paper", but it is different from the normal paper made of plant fiber that we usually say. It can be the material of body armor. It is naturally very difficult to process the fiber of this strength into paper, and the traditional processing method can't make it completely.
Dupont, an American company, struggled to develop the Aramid Paper in the 1960s and had a near-monopoly for the next half century.
Innovation: Electrically Heated Aramid Paper
For example, a research team at Qingdao University (China) created an Aramid Paper electric heating material in the year of 2022.
The material is Aramid Paper that can be heated with electricity. The most immediate, but also fatal when using under certain circumstances, problem is that if you want to use aramid as a medical material against the skin, the wire is very dangerous to the human body, because it is sharp and it can easily prick people. If you want to make Aramid Paper into electric heating material, it is best to make Aramid Paper itself with electrical conductivity, as soon as the electricity can be heated.
Unfortunately, this is also not possible chemically, because the structure of aramid means that it is an insulator kind of material. In other words, unless we change the composition of aramid, it won't conduct electricity.
New Method of Magnetron Coating Technique
The method is to coat Aramid Paper with metallic silver. In this way, the thin layer which looks like it grew upon Aramid Paper, conducts electricity and also makes direct contact with the human skin. There are high-end down jackets manufactories out there that are made to keep you warm and reflect your body's thermal radiation, preventing heat from escaping to the outside of your clothing. The difficulty here is that Aramid Paper is not an ordinary fabric, and the scenes used in it usually have a very high precision, which requires a lot of improvements in the silver coating process to ensure that nothing is wrong.
The traditional silver-coating method is done, the binding force between Aramid Paper and silver is not very strong, and easy to fall off so precision of result can not be guaranteed.
The current coating method is magnetron sputtering. Before coating, the surface of Aramid Paper should be treated by plasma clean. Aramid Paper is very strong materials. Only with plasma treatment, so that the surface of aramid will be like some ionic electrons gathering on the surface, this is the molecular level of "treatment”. On this basis, using magnetic coating technology, silver atoms are precisely sputtered onto the surface of Aramid Paper, silver-coated Aramid Paper is made.
At this point, if the Aramid Paper is electrically connected, it can be used for heating. Moreover, the heating is so fast that it takes only six seconds to reach 120 degrees Celsius if the electricity is applied at 1.2 volts.
If you are interested in Magnetron Sputtering Coating Technique, please contact VPI (Vision Precision Instruments) for learning more about coating Silver / Ag on your sample, please contact us for making appointment online, our online live video meeting could show the demo for your needs.
