CURRENT STATUS OF COMMERCIAL ION-IMPLANTATION IN SPAIN

Commercial ion beam implantation has been steadily growing in Spain fo r the last 8 years. The emphasis has been placed, similar to other Eur opean countries, on the surface treatment of precision tooling and mou lds rather than in large numbers of engineering components. This has s omehow limited the growth of the market since ion implantation has to compete strongly with well established surface engineering alternative s, such as PVD, thermochemical and chemical processes. However, the po ssibilities of performing selected area ion implantation treatments at controlled temperatures and with computer control of the processing b eam allows rapid treatment of selective areas at a very competitive le vel. One of the application areas where the process has been applied m ore successfully is in the area of transformation of plastics (injecti on and extrusion processes), where treatment of nozzles, mould cavitie s, calibrating extrusion dies, etc. is carried out on a regular basis. Also, ion implantation has yielded good results in the improvement of coining dies for the Spanish mint and is also currently applied for c utting tools for plastics, rubber and paper, as well as in tooling for the manufacturing of cans. Biomedical applications are still in the d evelopment and evaluation stage, largely due to the nature of the Span ish market, which has a less significant presence of native capital ma nufacturing companies. In this paper, an overview is presented of some of the current applications from the two active organisations in ion implantation, INASMET and AIN, with an indication of the areas in whic h actual research and technology development (R + TD) and industrial t reatment services are performed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science S.A.