VDI’s Product Development Engineer Receives Technical Award at AIMCAL R2R Conference 2019

Rob Malay, Ph.D., Product Development Engineer at VDI, was the recipient of the John Matteucci Technical Excellence Award at this year’s AIMCAL R2R Conference 2019. He received the award for his paper titled “Utilizing Plasmon Mediated Constructive Interference for Selective Wavelength Reflection with Roll-to-Roll Physical Vapor Deposition.”

Malay also had the opportunity to present his paper during the Advanced R2R Film session of the conference.

He articulated his findings on sputtered coatings having historically seen a wide variety of uses, from functional films in electronics, to passively integrated optical filters, to decorative and aesthetically appealing applications. Roll-to-roll sputter deposition has typically not seen the type of advanced optical and tribological coating that is seen on glass substrates and silicon wafers. Using reflective metal layers coated with finely controlled sputtered dielectric films, tunable wavelength reflection can be achieved. The reflective wavelengths are generated through constructive interference of the incident reflective light with surface plasmons resonating at the metal-dielectric interface. This work will demonstrate its use in the visible spectrum with generated colors. However, other wavelength ranges, such IR and UV, have also been demonstrated.

The John Matteucci Technical Award honors, John Matteucci who was recognized around the world as a leader in the field of web coatings. His Inspiration to both AIMCAL and the international conferences on vacuum web coating lead to the development of this prestigious award being given to the authors of the best paper in each of the web coating and the vacuum web coating tracks.

Congratulations to Rob Malay, Ph.D.!