Fabrication of functional nanostructured coatings by a combined sol-gel and plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition method

Nanostructures have a wide range of potential applications in industry because they can impart novel mechanical or functional properties to coatings such as abrasion resistance, UV shielding, superhydrophobicity. In this work we present a method for the fabrication of nanostructured coatings with improved mechanical properties, in which sol-gel nanoparticles are deposited on a surface and embedded in a ceramic film by plasmaenhanced chemical vapour deposition. This synthetic strategy is applied to the fabrication of transparent nanostructured antiscratch coatings.