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Brighton Science Blog
Topic: Coating Processes
How to Measure Contact Angle on Convex and Concave Surfaces
Historically, accurately measuring contact angle on concave and convex surfaces has been a challenge. The typical method used to measure contact angle on these types of surfaces has been with a benchtop goniometer. The challenges arise from the way goniometers measure contact angle—from a...
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Meet Brighton Science's Chief Scientist, Giles Dillingham
A Deep History in Materials Science Founder and Chief Scientist of Brighton Science, Dr. Giles Dillingham's fascination with the connections between the invisible (the molecular structure of the world around us) and the perceivable (the properties and behavior of materials and objects) stems from a...
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Using an XPS to Understand Surfaces Critical to Adhesion
In today’s blog post we’ll be highlighting our lab’s capabilities. With the help of Rose Roberts, Ph.D., Senior Custom Applications and Materials Engineer, we’ll complete an overview of our x-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS), one of our more complex tools, and how we use it to research the...
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Surface Quality Measurements Enable Plating and Coating Chemistry Suppliers to Guarantee Quality to Their Customers
Automotive supply chains are complex. Nearly 78 million vehicles were manufactured in 2020. Each vehicle may have upwards of 30,000 individual parts. Automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) need to manage billions of parts annually. If any of these parts fail, vehicle performance is...
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The Water Break Test as a Surface Measurement Gauge
The water break test is a common way for manufacturers to test the surface cleanliness of metals. Compared to other legacy cleanliness tests, it is relatively simple to perform, however, the results rely almost entirely on the subjective eye of the person performing the test. Hydrophobic...
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Why Knowing Water Contact Angle is Important for Successful Adhesive Performance
Adhesives are an integral part of modern manufacturing, but choosing the right adhesive is only one part of the equation. It’s well known that you won’t get a reliable bond with an adhesive if you just slap the adhesive onto your material without doing anything to prepare that surface. What ISN’T...
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How to Avoid Polymeric Coating Failure Which Leads to Corrosion in Materials
We know that plastics are in nearly everything these days, but we don’t often think about how plastics are also on nearly everything. Polymer coatings are as common as the latex paint covering the walls of your house. For industrial use, polymeric coatings have been protecting and beautifying...
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What are Surfactants and How Do They Impact Surface Tension?
In recent articles we’ve discussed what surface tension and surface energy are. Manufacturers need to acquaint themselves with these concepts because controlling surface quality through surface energy measurement of solid materials is the most predictive method of ensuring high performance bonds...
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What is the Difference Between Surface Free Energy and Surface Energy?
When it comes down to it, this is another purely semantic question much like the one we dealt with in another article comparing the terms “surface tension” and “surface energy.” Surface free energy is free energy in a particular space - the surfaces of materials. Free energy, in its most...
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How to Measure Surface Tension
The attractive force of the molecules present at the surface of a liquid towards each other is called the surface tension of that liquid.
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What is the Difference Between Surface Tension and Surface Energy
Using adhesives in manufacturing is becoming increasingly common for building everything from massive machines to everyday tech devices. But companies' reliance on the science of adhesion to make sure their products work perfectly and look marvelous didn’t start there. In the centuries since the...
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Better Consumer Electronics Reliability: Coatings and Adhesives
In a recent study conducted by Instrumental, the top ten most common manufacturing defects were examined. The number one defect that manufacturers fight against is a deficiency in glue. It’s a simple fact that electronic products are relying on adhesive bonding far more than mechanical fasteners in...
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The Huge Need for Zero Defect, Large Scale Molding Processes
Manufacturing large-scale molded products such as pools, boats, and aircraft parts is as herculean a process as the products they generate. Colossal molds are used to form fiberglass and other composites into aircraft wing panels, fuselages, boat hulls, bus shells, and pools. The proper...
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The Best Method of Controlling HMDS Use in Semiconductor Manufacturing
Semiconductors are one of the most fascinating areas of electronics manufacturing. The ability to “grow” almost irreducibly small integrated circuit components on silicon wafers has made an incredible amount of micronization possible. The theory has always been that as the chips got smaller, their...
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Surface Preparation for Reliable Optical Coatings in Photonics Manufacturing
Coatings are an indispensable part of manufacturing photonics. The coatings help determine the most basic functionality of the lenses they are applied to. How much light passes through, what happens to that light when it passes through the lens, does some light get absorbed, are some spectral...
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Ensuring the Durability of Oleophobic Coatings on Consumer Tech
We’re all thinking a lot more about the surfaces we touch and the invisible things that might be on those surfaces. Manufacturers have been thinking about how surfaces interact with our skin and the environment long before COVID-19 made us all much more cognizant of what we can get from touching...
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Surface Analyst vs. Goniometer Measurements
The Study of Goniometer Measurements Contact angle goniometry is the study of the characterization of liquid/solid interactions. The first benchtop goniometer designed at the NRL (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory) served as a monumental advance with a way to measure contact angles to measure surface...
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How to Know if Hydrophilic Coatings on Medical Devices Provide the Necessary Comfort for Patients
Comfort is more than just a nice thing to hope for when it comes to medical devices like tubing, catheters and stents that are implanted into the human body. Comfort, in this instance, is referring to the absence of pain. Having a piece of plastic or metal inserted into your body is never going to...
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Coatings on Car Sensors and Why We Don’t Have Driverless Cars Yet
Our relationship to our vehicles may have changed in the past few months with the idea of commuting to work looking more like a shuffle to the desk across the room rather than a drive to the office across town. However, cars have not dropped from their prominence in our society. With health risks...
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Controlling Parts Washing Methods for Medical Components
Cleanliness is next to production standardization requirements for medical device manufacturers (as the old saying goes). Devices built to be inserted within the human body understandably need to meet the highest cleanliness standards. Companies in this industry have already known what many of us...
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How to Control Additive Blooming in Polymer Films
We all take the ease of peeling open, and resealing packs of double stuff Oreos for granted. The plastic packaging that maintains the freshness of our favorite snacks and foods has become so ubiquitous it doesn’t even register as existing, until we try to open that hotdog pack with our bare hands...
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The Best Way to Verify Medical Diagnostics Coatings
The biomedical industry runs on testing. Testing is at the heart of meeting extensive requirements to ensure healthcare practices and facilities are safe. A kind of testing that has been on all of our minds lately is the kind of testing that analyzes the presence of diseases. Often these tests...
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How to Protect Overmolded Connectors for Medical Devices
Protective coverings are part and parcel of our lives these days. For industries reliant upon electronic components and connectors, protective coverings in the form of polymeric overmolding encapsulation need to remain sealed and impervious to the environment. To accomplish this, manufacturers of...
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How to Bond PTFE to Anything
Polytetrafluoroethylene or PTFE is a very common material in wide use among almost every major industry. This ultra-lubricious and multi-use fluoropolymer touches everyone from aerospace and automotive industries (as an insulating cover on cabling) to musical instrument maintenance (it’s found in...
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A Summary of Surface Treatment Methods for Manufacturers
One of our many mantras here at Brighton Science is that all manufacturers who bond, coat, seal, paint and print stand a better chance of fully understanding and controlling their manufacturing process when it’s defined as an adhesion process. It's our mantra, because adhesion is quite literally...
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Cleaning Strategies for Great Adhesion
Cleanliness in manufacturing gains avid devotees all the time. Once the importance of cleanliness is grasped, it’s nearly impossible to think about manufacturing processes without considering the pervasive impact cleanliness has on every aspect and feature of the process. Cleaning as a means to...
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Topcoat to Primer Surface Reliability for Aircraft Painting
Adhesion problems don’t have a preference when it comes to the kind of damage they cause. Whether the end result is structural or cosmetic, adhesion-related failure headaches for manufacturers abound. For aircraft OEMs, one of the most crucial aesthetic operations is the topcoat of paint, although...
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Why Surface Cleanliness is Crucial for Electronic PCBs
Defining “clean” is actually more complicated than it sounds. Cleanliness can be in the eye of the beholder (I mean, we all had a college roommate who swore they were tidy, but let’s be honest…) and it can also be calculated and precisely managed to the nth degree. In regard to pcb cleanliness for ...
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Surface Preparation for Primer Coating of Composites in Aerospace Applications
A lot goes into painting an aircraft. This massive, multi-stage process begins long before that final, shiny topcoat you see on the wings and tail is applied. The components are molded, then they’re prepared (which is often a multi-step process in-and-of itself), then they’re assembled, then there...
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Conformal Coating Failure Caused by Poor Surface Cleanliness
Electronic components consist of many exposed and delicate pieces that leave them vulnerable. A lot is relying on these fragile parts to function without fail. From implantable medical devices to navigational equipment and from sensor packages in cars to cell phones, the manufacturers of...
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Is Roughness as Important as Surface Cleanliness to Adhesion?
When the subject of material surfaces comes up among manufacturing engineers the discussion usually centers on the physical attributes of that surface; the surface topography or morphology, or more simply - the surface roughness. Preparing material surfaces for assembly, coating, painting or...
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The 3 Crucial Elements for High-Performance Adhesion in Manufacturing
Excellent adhesion relies on the manufacturer’s ability to understand and control three distinct yet interrelated elements. In manufacturing, adhesive bonding takes many forms, but the fundamental principles of adhesion are always the same. Even if the application is metal joint welding, Parylene...
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Fundamentals of Adhesion & Why 3 Molecular Layers Matter
Adhesion is a powerful phenomenon that can hold massive structures together and fuse microscopic compounds. It is also extremely dependent upon delicate and fragile processes to succeed. In manufacturing, adhesive bonding takes many forms but the principles of adhesion are always the same. Even if...
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Best-practice Surface Preparation Processes for New Products
New Product Development is an essential component to the successful growth of companies who always challenge themselves to improve and innovate. Getting this design stage right is pivotal in that it sets in motion everything the product will be and how well it will perform. Yet, many new products...
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What is the Best Fast & Accurate Alternative to Dyne Testing?
Dyne solutions have been the most common method of quality-checking material surface cleanliness for decades. Their ubiquity and low cost have led them to be heavily relied upon by manufacturers even though they are imprecise, destructive to surfaces, and harmful to the user. The science behind...
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How to Ensure a Manufacturing Surface is Clean Enough for Adhesion
Cleanliness and adhesion go hand-in-hand. If you’re looking for an adhesion process to be successful then you are also absolutely interested in cleaning the materials involved in the application. In order to get the most out of your cleaning operations it’s imperative to know three things: What...
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Can a Surface Science Lab Ensure Adhesion in Manufacturing?
Manufacturers utilize research and design laboratories all the time. To scale new products up to the production line, years of toiling in testing labs is done to ensure that everything goes off without a hitch once production starts. There are some areas crucial to adhesion processes that these R&D...
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4 Common Factors that Impact Conformal Coating Adhesion
The pervasiveness of electronics in every manufacturing industry has provided unique challenges. Manufacturers are tasked with protecting these components in environments that make electronics vulnerable to even minute amounts of moisture, debris and environmental contamination. A useful solution...
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Deck the Hulls: Preparing Ship Hulls for Coating and Painting
Manufacturing a product to withstand the environmental stresses of wind, rain, and sediment is challenging enough. But, when you add saltwater and wave action to the mix, the detrimental threat of corrosion increases significantly. A coating adhesion test is important for quickly testing a surface...
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Guaranteeing Anti-fog Coating Application on Automotive Headlights
The competitive nature of the automotive industry requires manufacturers to engineer the ideal product; failures, no matter how small, are unacceptable and can bring heavy consequences.
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Teflon: More Than Just Pots and Pans
Teflon is a household name that commonly invokes images of eggs sizzling on a skillet, spatulas flipping pancakes, or rice steaming in a pan. But there is much more to this magical non-stick coating. Teflon, a brand name for PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene), prohibits food from sticking to pots and...
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Surface Treatment Processes: Flame Treatment
Flame treatment is a surface activation treatment process used to chemically modify a surface for better adhesion. This process is typically used on low energy surfaces that can be difficult to adhere to, such as plastics and composites. The treatment is also very gentle, posing low risk to the...
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Brighton Science's Exceptional Lab: Experts in Advanced Materials and Processes
Brighton Science Lab Capabilities The history of Brighton Science (formerly BTG Labs) is rooted in adhesion research. Originally a development lab, Brighton Science specialized in plasma polymerized coatings. The engineers worked with coatings containing corrosion-resistant and anti-microbial...
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