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ABSTRACT:

SPIN COATING CURVED SURFACES

Authors: 
Mathieu Sellier, Volker Nock, Edouard Boujo, Shayne Gooch, Selin Duruk, Ross Shepherd, Finn McIntyre 

What do smartphone displays, solar cells, electronic circuit boards, and CDs have in common? They all tend to be flat, rigid structures. The reason for this feature relates to the fact that most of the manufacturing processes involved in the production of these objects have been optimized for flat, rigid substrates. The corner stone of these processes involves coating the substrate with a thin coating layer and a common technique, known for its effectiveness and low-cost, is spin-coating. To this day, spin-coating is only effective for flat substrates because it leads to non-uniformities on curved ones. In this research, we aim to extend the applicability of spin-coating to curved substrates. The hypothesis at the centre of the research project is that it is possible to distribute the coating uniformly on the substrate by imposing the correct motion kinematics to the substrate. 

This presentation will summarize some of the accomplishments to date and the challenges ahead.

BIOGRAPHY:

Since 2018, Mathieu Sellier is Professor of Fluid Mechanics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand). He is also Head of that Department since 2019. Prof Sellier graduated with a Master in “Modelling and Simulation in Mechanics” from Université Grenoble Alpes (France) in 2000, then got his PhD from the University of Leeds (UK) in 2003 working on the development of numerical methods to better understand the flow of thin liquid films and droplets on complex textured surfaces for coating applications.  From 2003 to 2006, he was a PostDoc at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (Kaiserslautern, Germany) in the Marie-Curie Research Training Network MAGICAL (Mathematics for the Glass Industry Computations and Analysis).

Prof Sellier started at the University of Canterbury as a lecturer in Theoretical Fluid Mechanics in 2006 and now leads the Interfaces and Inverse Problems lab (I&IP) — see link here. His research interests are broad but typically revolve around modelling free surface or multiphase flow phenomena at small scales for which capillary and wetting phenomena dominate (droplets and thin film flows) or at large geophysical scales (river or glacier flows). Prof Sellier’s other area of research expertise is related to inverse problems for which one tries to infer the unknown causes of observed phenomena.