Abstrakt
Metallization of textiles plays an important role in a wide range of applications such as wearable electronics, the production of decorative textiles, or for developing materials for antibacterial/antiviral/antifungal personal protection. Although magnetron sputtering is the most often used plasma-based technique for coating textiles with thin layers of metals, approaches that utilize plasma-based gas aggregation sources (GAS) of metallic nanoparticles (NPs) receive increasing attention in the scientific community.
In this study, we have used a GAS system of original construction that uses instead of conventionally used planar magnetron a post-cylindrical magnetron. The body of the magnetron is made of copper that acts as a sputtering target.
For better target sputtering efficiency, target utilization and process stability, the magnetic circuit rotates at a frequency of several rotations per minute. The characterization of the efficiency of production of Cu NPs was carried out using Ar as the working gas at pressures from 10 Pa to 200 Pa, variable frequency of the rotation of magnetic circuits, using different gas in-let position and with magnetron currents up to 2 A to identify optimal process parameters for the coating of textiles with a thin layer of Cu nanoparticles.
Based on these, the optimal conditions were found to be at low rotation rates of the magnetic circuit, higher magnetron currents, gas aggregation pressure of about 100 Pa and gas in-let position that assures asymmetric and turbulent flow patterns with respect to the post magnetron axis. It is shown that under optimized conditions it is possible to deposit on textiles ~10 nm plasmonic copper NPs at a deposition rate that reaches several mg/h.
Furthermore, preliminary results indicated that the studied system is suitable for the generation of bi-metallic Cu/Ag NPs, if the segmental Cu/Ag target is used, as witnessed by th HRTEM analysis of produced NPs.