Chemical engineers at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, invented ALD in the liquid phase that can produce materials indistinguishable from those made in the gas phase, with far cheaper equipment and no excess precursors. The researchers achieved this breakthrough by carefully measuring the ratio of the reacting precursors before injecting them onto the surface of a substrate. This way, they used exactly the right amount of precursor, with no leftovers that can cause unwanted reactions or be wasted.
The new method also reduces costs by requiring only standard lab equipment for chemical synthesis. It can also be easily scaled up to coat more than 150 g of material with the same cheap equipment, without loss of coating quality. The technique can even achieve coatings that are usually not possible using gas-phase ALD, e.g., by using volatile precursors with extremely low volatility.
A cheaper way to scale up atomic layer deposition, Phys.org (LINK)
Benjamin P. Le Monnier et al. Atomic Layer Deposition on Dispersed Materials in Liquid Phase by Stoichiometrically Limited Injections, Advanced Materials (2019). DOI: 10.1002/adma.201904276
----------
By Abhishekkumar Thakur