The formation of diamond-like carbon film at atmospheric pressure by the pulsed laser/plasma hybrid deposition method

Abstract

A pulsed laser/plasma hybrid deposition method has been developed to produce the diamond-like carbon (DLC) film at atmospheric pressure in this work. A plasma torch was used to heat up the carbon particles which were simultaneously ablated by a pulsed laser, thus the kinetic energy of the carbon particle can be increased to form the carbon atoms with amorphous bonding structure of the DLC film by this proposed hybrid deposition method. The influences of the plasma flow have been examined numerically and experimentally. In the numerical analysis, the temperatures of the plasma flow at various inlet pressures and electrode currents have been predicted. According to the experimental results of the carbon film inspected by the Raman spectroscopy, it reveals that the intensity ratio of the D-band to G-band of the carbon film can be reduced to 0.5 by the implementation of plasma flow. Therefore the DLC film was solidly formed. The adhesive strength of the DLC film was also characterized by the scratch test, it can be found that the critical loading of the film is up to 19 N.