Investigation of aluminium thin layer microstructure on BOPP polymer substrate

In this work, 40 μm biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP) polymer substrate is coated in a roll coater system. The single- and double-coated aluminium thin layers are analyzed by XRD, SEM, TEM, AFM and optical light microscopy. The size and density of pinholes are investigated by using TEM, the size of the pinholes are in the range of 0.8–8 μm, it is shown that with increasing sample thickness, the dimension of pinholes decreases. SEM and AFM are applied to study the surface morphology. The results show that the surface roughness of double-coated film is better than the single-coated one and the size of pinholes is smaller. The transmittance through the samples is measured on the UV–Vis range. The results show that double-coated film has significantly low transmittance (almost zero transmittance) in UV–Vis region.