The next generation of deposition equipment for wear protection coatings

Current deposition equipment has been designed largely as a compromise betw een the emission characteristics of the vapour sources and the shape and qu antities of the parts to be coated. Conditioning equipment was then added t o adapt the equipment to the process requirements - resulting in twin or tr iple 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 c oating processes, where the coating quality does not depend on the constitu tion of the batch. The HTC 3000 equipment is the first of a family of machines designed accord ing to those principles. Its conditioning steps match the performance of mo dern heat treatment furnaces and its new plasma flow vapour sources have be en developed to fit the equipment. Their design allows the deposition of io n plated hard coatings essentially free from macro particle contamination o r the deposition of sputtered coatings with a degree of vapour ionization a nd substrate plasma density never obtained with conventional unbalanced mag netrons. They also offer the possibility of efficient low pressure thermoch emical treatment and integrated duplex processes. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.