 So thank you very much. I wanted to tell you about work we have been doing that has now been extended into the area of transportation light wading using hybrid coatings. Now hybrid materials and the kind of hybrid material I'm talking about here are those that are formed with inorganic and organic components, essentially tailored at molecular lens scales. So we connect them and we can make a variety of multifunctional coatings that can have different properties ranging from high stiffness, high hardness, wear properties through high transparencies and even conducting properties as you'll see in the talk today. And they're used in a wide range of different technologies that could be used in anything from anti-reflection coating systems through to sensors, barrier films for photovoltaics. They're used in emerging stretchable and wearable electronic areas, touch display. And of course as I'll talk to you about today in the area of coating plastic substrates for transportation light wading. Another advantage of these materials is that they can be made potentially very cheaply. And particularly what I wanna focus on today is the use of atmospheric plasma deposition. So we create a plasma in California air at room temperature or at least low temperature and we can then deposit onto surfaces like plastics. So polymeric glazing and moldings are an extremely high want from the transportation community. There's a number of very real benefits here and of course you guys all know we already drive automobiles that have a large number of plastic components don't always survive very long. So the advantages here are lightweight. In the US alone on an annual basis if we were to replace just the glass glazing in cars you would save something like 195 million pounds. Worldwide that translates into something like 1.24 billion pounds. So that's a lot of mass that you wouldn't otherwise have to move around. But actually turns out that that's really only one of the benefits. Another benefit here is that you lower the center of mass of the vehicle. So from a crash worthiness point of view this actually presents a big advantage. There's a significant amount of part consolidation that you get by using plastic substrates and moldings. You can enable aerodynamic improvements in vehicles and of course we're seeing that in many lower cost vehicles now that are being produced. And maybe one of the most important reasons from a marketing point of view is actually improved aesthetics of vehicles. You can make really cool looking transportation vehicles when you have the ability to mold in a relatively inexpensive way with plastic moldings. So what's the problem? The problem is you can't put a plastic substrate out into the terrestrial environment and expect it to last very long. It simply doesn't, it needs protection and we're all familiar with this. This is a pervasive problem in any form of plastic coating that actually is used in terrestrial applications. In current coatings just don't meet performance standards. This is a real problem. Coding methods that are used to actually make coatings of course typically either use vacuum based systems where you can form some of the highest quality coatings but then of course all the parts have to be put into a vacuum chamber. You have to pump it down to do the deposition. So that actually puts lots of constraints on things like throughput and makes the coating process expensive. On the other hand there are various ways of using sol-gel chemistries to make coatings. The problems here are often related to solvents that basically come out of the processing methods and that presents other problems and environmental challenges. And in all of these cases as I've mentioned we really do need to improve properties significantly. So that's the focus of what we've been trying to do on this program that's been newly supported by GSEP and involves thinking about ways of making much better protective systems, coating systems for plastic substrates. And let me acknowledge my students as you see over here in postdoc who have actually done all of the work that I'll show you today. So a couple of little sections that I wanted to go through in this talk. The first is since we really care about making durable systems I wanted to say just a little bit about what it is you need to know about a coating system that really is a key metric for its reliability. Then I'll turn to a section dealing with coatings that we're actually making and show you what I think are some very real successes in building some really impressive coating systems that have much better properties than even the best current commercial systems. And then show you how these methods can be extended to make things like other functional coatings involving for example anti-reflection coating systems and transparent and conducting films. So with respect to lifetimes from a thermomechanical point of view one of the most important aspects for long-term reliability and durability of a coating system is of course how well it adheres to the substrate. And over many years now and I'll show you some compendium of data here we have developed methods to measure adhesion in thin film systems where we can do this very accurately and very reproducibly to obtain either the adhesion of the interface or the cohesion of the layer. So this is gonna feature in this talk because it's one of the most fundamental metrics of long-term durability. Now though, let me also mention though that even if you've not exceeded the driving forces for, let me see if I can get this cursor to work here for, no I'm not able, oh there it is there. So this is the driving force here G that comes from the sort of stresses that might be present in a coating or the handling or packaging or whatever it is. When that exceeds the cohesion energy then of course the system will fail. But it turns out that if G is less than the adhesion energy then in the presence of environmental species or incoming photons from the environment or the sun or with increasing temperature then coatings might cohesively crack and debond from the substrate. And I'm showing a picture here of an actual commercial coating that was used on an aerospace commercial window application. So when you next fly on a plane if you look out of the window sometimes you'll see that sort of slightly crazed appearance and what this is in fact is exactly what you're seeing here. It's the most typical degradation process that happens to protective coating systems. So one measure of making a better coating is actually to be able to characterize these adhesive properties and also to characterize the kinetics of how fast they come apart. And so this is something we do in all of the work we do whether it's related to solar technologies or micro-electronic device technologies going through to coating systems as I'm talking about here. And I wanted to show this data here which represents the adhesion. These were the first measures of adhesion of commercial coating systems that are used on commercial aircraft. They had been used for literally years in some case decades. Some of them were known to perform better. Some of them were known not to perform as well but there was no metric by which this had been measured and characterized. So we were really able to do this for the first time and this is some of the original data that I'm showing here. There's some other interesting kinetic phenomenon that happens when you actually irradiate the specimen in situ with UV light as you can see here. The little sample is sitting down over there and here we can measure the rate at which these interfaces are debonding. And the important point here is that you can see this is just the mechanical loads on the bottom. This is the rate on the vertical axis but you can see that it's not just mechanical loads that are important. It's incoming photons that are destabilizing basically being absorbed and cleaving bonds that give rise to an acceleration in the debond process. So these are the things we've characterized and I promised you a compendium of data. This is a slide that I like to show that shows the range of adhesion values for a wide range of different materials and coatings, everything from microelectronics to organic photovoltaics to the recent perovskite systems. You can see wide ranges in properties here. Clearly higher numbers here indicate better performance. And so the coding systems we're looking at here are started around about 10 and increase. So that's a little calibration. Let me tell you now about some of the coatings that we're making for plastic substrates. So we create plasmas with two different methods. One is with a capacitively coupled plasma system shown in the middle. This typically uses either helium or nitrogen gas. It's a low temperature plasma. Or on the right hand side is a dielectric barrier, a breakdown system where we can create slightly higher temperature plasmas. The advantages here is that we can do it with just normal compressed air. Obviously using helium in the capacitively coupled system is not really conducive to industrial scale manufacturing. Now these plasmas, by the way, are ubiquitous. Practically every large company that applies protective coatings has them. They mostly use for preparing the surface, functionalizing the surface cleaning it rather than doing the deposition. So some of the innovation we've been able to make here is to actually use ways of delivering the precursors of coatings that we wanna build into these plasmas and then depositing them on the substrate. Now this is a plasma assisted process. We use precursors of various types. We've typically only used very simple inexpensive precursors so that we can make this a scalable manufacturing low cost process. And there are complex reactions that happen as these precursors decompose and then basically a film is grown, a coating is grown on the substrate. And we monitor these processes with various methods, including optical spectroscopies and in situ mass spectroscopy to figure out what the mechanisms are and what the decomposition processes of the precursors are. So let me show you some of the sort of higher level results here. The first is to show you the kind of highly transparent coatings that we can make. Now these coatings, and you can see one over here towards the bottom are essentially a hundred percent transparent in the visible. You simply cannot measure that those coatings are present. This is a coating on a polycarbonate substrate here. And then above that are two of the core properties that we would measure. One is the stiffness of the coating in the form of the elastic modulus. And the other is the adhesion energy, which I've already mentioned. Now I've circled two of the coatings that we've made here. They're made with the same precursor. We just simply adjust the plasma conditions. And in one case you can see we can make a very stiff coating. This coating has a stiffness that's very high. The star that you see here is the best current commercial Solgel coating. So this is what's typically used for aerospace window applications. And you can see that the coatings that we can make are actually much stiffer. Now stiffer coatings mean better wear properties, wear and abrasion properties. And that's again one of the most important things that you look for in a protective coating. So we can make stiffer coatings. You can't do this with Solgel processes because you can't use high enough annealing temperatures to actually develop the highly connected molecular network that would give you these stiffnesses. On the other hand, we can also buy, and these are the same two coating systems here shown on the other side. We can make them very adhesive. So the stiffer coating here, the essentially a dense silica coating made with atmospheric plasma essentially has the same adhesion value as a good commercial coating. But the other coating that's slightly less stiff, we actually incorporate little carbon bridges into these coatings. And we can make them adhere very well to the substrate. So we can get a combination here in these two different coatings of either high stiffness, which means high wear, abrasion properties, or high adhesion, which also translates into longer term durability. So the key then was to see whether we could do these things together. And we did this with a bilayer. We used the adhesive coating on the bottom, the stiff coating on the top that's shown over here. And you can see that we can achieve this bilayer coating over here which in terms of both stiffness and adhesion has far superior properties to the very best commercial coating that's currently available. So this has caused a lot of interest. We have a number of companies that are now thinking about using these types of systems we're actually engaged with several of them are doing real industry like abrasion and durability tests to assess the efficacy of these coatings. Those coatings were made with just one precursor. We can make these coatings with several different types of precursors. We can grow them very quickly. And you can see here again is another set of data showing another bilayer coating. This one is actually made much more quickly with even cheaper precursors and again has this great combination of properties. But wait, there's more. We also in my group do spray deposition for various different material systems. And just very recently as part of our GSEP program we've started looking at combining spray coating which of course is something that the industry is very familiar with with atmospheric plasma deposition. And here we can think about making an underlying thick coating with the spray deposition as shown over here and then basically come over the top of that with a atmospheric plasma deposited film. Now I mentioned that this is a capability in my group. We have a significant sol-gel capability. We make lots of different coatings. This is one hybrid coating that's made with an epoxy-functionalized silane and a zirconium alkoxide precursor. There's advantages of using this zirconium alkoxide. We can form very moisture resistant coatings. And so in this work what we've done is to actually do what I just said which is to make now a bilayer coating with initially spray and then atmospheric plasma. And here we have achieved the highest adhesion values we have ever seen for a coating system. You can see here adhesion values for this bilayer spray atmospheric plasma coating that are in access of 60 joules per meter squared. And in fact the failure here cannot happen at the interface. It happens in the bulk substrate. So we've made the interface and the coating so resistant to failure that it now fails in the substrate. And that of course is the measure of the best possible protective coating. So we're very excited about this strategy. This allows us to do it really quickly. Not a long process. We can actually combine the spray head with the plasma head and move the two on a gantry together. Could be moved over curved surfaces. So there's a lot of potential here for this method. Let me just spend the last couple of minutes talking about two other areas where we can use atmospheric plasma. One is in the production of anti-reflection coating systems. Again, there are advantages here because we can do this quickly. We can do it at low temperature. We can do it on plastics. We can do it on other devices, device materials. And clearly there's many applications where sensors are used or where glazings are used where anti-reflection properties are important. Our early work has looked just at single layer coatings and you can see here the simulation showing the effect of a single layer coating on reducing the reflection from a device surface. In this case, this is a silicon device. Obviously if you use multi-layer coatings you can get better anti-reflection properties. And again, we've done this in air. So no vacuum equipment here, no solution chemistry. This is just in air. And you can see here with either tantalum or titanium coatings the very significant improvement we get in anti-reflection properties, just with a single layer. So our work here now is looking at extending this to multi-layers where we expect that we can achieve even better anti-reflection coatings properties. And then finally, I'll make mention of some work we've done in transparent conducting films. Of course, many of you will know there's a lot of interest in replacing some of the more expensive transparent conducting materials like indium tin oxide and zinc oxide of course is potentially a very inexpensive alternative. The problem is that most zinc oxides have been made with vacuum-based systems and techniques. That's a very good quality films, high transparencies, good conductivities but you need expensive processing. So we've attempted to do this again just with atmospheric plasma in normal air environments. And this has been successful. Despite the fact that many people that are involved with much more sophisticated CBD processes told us that it would never work but in fact, unencumbered by that kind of knowledge we went out and did it anyway. And you can see here very successful coating here of several different polymers. We've coated PMMAs, polycarbonates, PET. We have a good adhesive film. We can get transparencies of up to 98%. And when you look at the all important resistivity you can see here values as low as 100 ohm centimeters were achieved again in air. No annealing, no doping, simply deposited at low temperatures on plastics. So again, we're excited about this. We haven't even really started to look in detail at what we could achieve with doping and we can easily dope in these processes hopefully to get even better conductivities in these materials. And you can do the same thing with tie nitride, tie oxide, hybrid blends. And again here we can achieve resistivities on the order of 100 ohm centimeters. So we think there's a lot of possibilities for atmospheric plasma deposition. It's like a toaster. Most companies have them. Nobody's just really thought of taking this additional step injecting precursors into these systems and being able to fabricate everything from really protective high quality coding systems through to other functional coatings that could be used for sensor and other technologies that include everything from display through solar. So thank you for your attention. Time for questions. The application to GSEP would tend to be, I would think in making lightweight moldings and then put these coatings on them so that they're strong enough and last long enough. So the breakthrough that affects decarbonization is in lightweight vehicles, is that right? That's correct. Well, in transportation systems in general, I mean the focus, the sexy pictures that I show are of these cool cars but there's application in lightweight trucks. Ford is actually about to announce a truck that will have all polymer glazing. So there's applications in areas like that or in other transportation systems. Anywhere where you're moving large masses and there would be an advantage of using plastic substrates as opposed to the much more heavier substrates that would typically be used. Your high adhesive coatings, what happens to them when you're recycling and what happens to those chemicals when they are maybe evaporated by heat and go into the environment? Yeah, good question. And the basic components of our coatings, particularly those hybrid coatings are they're essentially organosilicate materials. So we don't really have anything other than carbon, silicon and oxygen in those coatings. And so there's no particularly environmentally dangerous atoms present in those particular coatings. So they're designed not to decompose, obviously as a protective coating, you'd like it not to undergo any easy decomposition process. But basically, if you were to heat them up to higher temperatures in the presence of oxidizing environment, they would basically decompose into silicon, oxygen and carbon. So is it correct that the biggest failure mode you're worrying about for the automotive glazings is UV light accelerating the crazing? And if that's right, what materials, what coatings could you put on there that would block the UV light to protect the plastic? Yeah, Mike, that's a great question. It turns out, well, UV light is not the only thing we're concerned about. You primarily have to initially start worrying about things like wear and abrasion resistance. So you want high stiffness coatings. You need them to be adhesive because otherwise they don't stay on. But you're right, and as I showed, UV light actually accelerates the debonding processes, the cohesive cracking, and there's even some other bulk properties, changes in the films that can happen. So in addition to the coatings as I've described them, you also need a UV protection package. And I didn't show any of the results that we have, but Shingming, who's actually sitting right over there, has been looking at incorporating UV absorbing molecules during the atmospheric plasma deposition, and he's actually succeeded. So we can actually deposit the underlying layer with a UV absorbing molecule that will actually shield the underlying polymer from UV light because in fact, you're less concerned about the coatings in terms of UV degradation. It's more the underlying substrate that needs to be protected. So including UV absorbing molecules is something that we're doing. Including nanoparticles is the other strategy. And we haven't started that work yet, but as part of what we want to do in the GSEP effort is actually to include nanoparticles during deposition. These are the typical UV absorbing nanoparticles that would provide that kind of protection, but it's important to include that as well. Okay, thank you very much for a great presentation. Sure.