Dynamic Wetting in Thin Liquid Film Coating: developing new technologies to enable very thin film coating at high speeds

The challenge here is to develop new technologies to enable very thin film coating (a few microns) at high speeds.

Research aims & objectives

As the limitation to stable coating is the onset of air entrainment at high speed, the idea is to coat under gases at very low pressures so that very low gas viscosities are attained. The work requires the development of powerful visualisation schemes to enable the observation of the dynamic wetting region and capture the key features of dynamic wetting failure with such gases. There will be also a need to underpin the experimental observations with mathematical models. Research in the fluid mechanics of coating flows is well established at Bradford, world leading and supported by state of the art facilities, including prototype coating lines (dip, roll, gravure, slot, curtain, print, multilayer).