The next generation of deposition equipment for wear protection coatings

Abstract

Abstract Current deposition equipment has been designed largely as a compromise between the emission characteristics of the vapour sources and the shape and quantities of the parts to be coated. Conditioning equipment was then added to adapt the equipment to the process requirements — resulting in twin or triple chamber load lock systems or walls covered with inefficient radiation heaters. Efficient equipment for job coating requires a different approach, that must start from an overall optimization of the system in view of the users requirements. Its design must include all conditioning steps required for the process from the start. Among the key requirements for job coating equipment we find: short cycle time, versatile loading, conditioning and coating processes, where the coating quality does not depend on the constitution of the batch. The HTC 3000 equipment is the first of a family of machines designed according to those principles. Its conditioning steps match the performance of modern heat treatment furnaces and its new plasma flow vapour sources have been developed to fit the equipment. Their design allows the deposition of ion plated hard coatings essentially free from macro particle contamination or the deposition of sputtered coatings with a degree of vapour ionization and substrate plasma density never obtained with conventional unbalanced magnetrons. They also offer the possibility of efficient low pressure thermochemical treatment and integrated duplex processes.