The vacuum roll to roll coating business has proven to have a very complex and exciting history. While the author has tried to touch on many of the events, products and companies that helped to weave this story, it is without doubt that many contributions have been left out. He is sorry for this. There were as many dead ends in this growth as there were successes. One the dead ends the author was involved in was the development of a transparent electrographic film to be used in wide bed electrostatic printers. The end product was to be used to directly generate engineering drawings, particularly for the aircraft industry. The problem was that the Rs of the conductive coating had to be in the megohm range and be environmentally stable. This was a very interesting problem, but the engineers at Andus Corp. Solved it within 6 months. However, just as the film was about to be introduced to the market a new technology that used a slurry of ITO particles in a solvent carrier was introduced. The vacuum based product could not compete in price and the demand for it disappeared over night.It should be pointed out that the industry has been advancing the technology of vacuum roll very rapidly over the last few decades. We were dealing in nano technologies before the word became popular. However there are new challenges ahead that we must be aware of. Nano particles, conductive polymers, and printed electronics are in the forefront of the progress being made in designing and developing new products and processes. Sumitomo has just announced a ambient solvent applied transparent film that appears to have equal to or better Rs vs VTLration than ITO and is very extendable. It is not in full production yet, but they are making promises of having high volume samples of the "ink' by the end of 2007.Vacuum roll coating and these new approaches are most likely going to follow parallel paths in the future. But we have to make sure we continue our progress.
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