Self-Assembled Antireflective Coatings Using Silica and Titania Nanoparticles (thesis)

Abstract

Antiretlective coatings have a wide range of applications, from eyeglass and camera lenses to solar panels, and from microscope lenses and optoelectronic devices to skyscraper windows. It is well known that an uncoated glass substrate transmits approximately 92% of the light incident on it and retlects back approximately 8%. Our research involves the fabrication of antiretlective coatings which transmit light in excess of 92% and hence reduce the amount of light that is retlected from the surface of the glass substrate. Our research also focuses on the efficient, cost-effective production of these anti-retlective coatings. Our study examines several factors that affect the quality of antiretlective coatings created by the ionic self-assembly of multilayers (ISAM) of silica (Si02) and/or titania (Ti02) nanoparticIes with poly(diallyldimethylammonium chloride) (PDDA) polycation on glass substrates .. We use factorial design in order to design our experiments, which enables us to investigate the effects of multiple factors (such as the molarity and pH of the nanoparticIe solutions, the size of the nanoparticIes and the number of nanoparticIe-polycation bilayers) on the optical properties of the films simultaneously. The first order effects of these factors, as well as their interactions on the retlectance, transmittance, and uniformity of the coatings are reported. We find that a number of different factor-level combinations exhibit transmittance values in excess of 96%, well above that of an untreated slide and comparable to commercial coatings.