Vacuum and atmospheric plasma technology
Plasmalex offers turnkey vacuum and atmospheric plasma solutions, delivering both chemistries and equipment, and customized solutions.
What is Plasma?
Plasma is considered the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid and gas. By adding energy matter can be transformed from solid to liquid, from liquid to gas and from gas to plasma.
At the plasma stage matter exists in the form of a gas of ions and free electrons and is highly electrically conductive. Although plasma is abundant in the universe, natural occurrences are relatively rare on earth. Lightning, static electricity and auroras are the primary sources of natural plasma.
Plasma can be generated in different ways. CPI, specializes in atmospheric plasma. Europlasma is specialized in low pressure (vacuum) plasma
Benefits of plasma technology for surface treatment
Plasma technology for surface treatment solutions offers several benefits:
- High precision surface cleaning, activation and etching.
- Very consistent nanocoating quality
- The process penetrates in the molecular level of material.
- A low process temperature, important for sensitive substrates and material handling
- Low chemistry consumption
- Environmentally friendly production process
Low environmental footprint
- Compared to conventional chemical coatings Plasmalex’ processes guarantee the lowest environmental footprint
- The lately developed PlasmaGuard® coating chemistry is halogen free.
- Moreover, thanks to their high filtration system, Plasmalex machines are safe in use.
Vacuum versus atmospheric plasma
Unique Plasmalex offering
- Customer tailored solutions for static as well as roll-to-roll applications
- Conformal treatment of up to 2 m wide rolls
- Unique industrial-scale test & job coating capabilities
- Experienced team of plasma experts
- Global service support network
- Extensive portfolio of patents protecting machine design, processes and methods for
plasma deposition
We are unique in offering industrial-scale solutions for both static as well as reel to reel PECVD equipment & chemistry
- 30 years of experience allowed us to optimize machine & process designs for low pressure plasma applications
- We have built an extensive track record of customized solutions
With multi-stage coating technology
Turnkey Solutions
Our solutions include the development of specific chemistry and contract
manufacturing services on our own equipment. In partnership with our sister
company Spoolex, we can provide integrated production lines that are fully turnkey.
Our integrated production lines include:
- automatic loading and unloading
- turret slitter/rewinders
- automation of upstream and downstream processing
Plasmalex has the most advanced technology in the world for industrial size roll-to-roll atmospheric plasma applications:
- We have a patented electrode/gas diffusor assembly which ensures:
- Control of the chemistry
- A homogeneous ultra-thin coating (1-10 nm) of over 2 m width
- Reduced electrode fouling
- No contamination of the product by plasma generated powders
Industrialized atmospheric plasma applications come with some challenges that we overcome
- Inerting (O2and H2O)
- Gas and monomers handling
- Power management
- To avoid the risk of poor coating quality
- Process industrialization over width and length
- Homogeneity over wide width and length
Therefore we have an important focus on R&D with:
- Continuous Research on the interaction of the different process parameters
- There are up to 89 interconnected plasma parameters to control (classically 20-40)
- We have a continuous process to control the results so that a stable treatment quality is guaranteed
- Continuous Research on various generator technology.
- We continuously test different technologies to select the optimal technology for each application
- We focus on chemistry in the plasma as a sustainable answer to the traditional wet chemistry solutions
