What is vacuum coating equipment

What is it?Vacuum Coating Equipment? #

Vacuum coating equipment mainly refers to a kind of coating that needs to be carried out under high vacuum, and there are many kinds of them, including vacuum ion evaporation, magnetron sputtering, MBE molecular beam epitaxy, and PLD laser sputtering deposition. The main ideas are divided into evaporation and sputtering.

What needs to be coated becomes the substrate and the material that needs to be coated becomes the target. The substrate and target are in the same vacuum cavity.

Generally speaking, evaporation coating involves heating the target material so that the surface components are evaporated in the form of atomic clusters or ions and deposited on the surface of the substrate, and a thin film is formed through the film forming process (growth of heterogeneous structural layers of the scattering island structure). For sputtering coating, it can be simply understood that the target is bombarded by electrons or high-energy lasers, and the surface components are sputtered out in the form of atomic groups or ions, and finally deposited on the surface of the substrate to undergo film forming.

Vacuum coating equipment use process #

1 electronic control cabinet operation #

(1) Pumps, air supply

2) Turn on the main power

3) Turn on the service pump and the vacuum gauge with the gauge in the V1 position and wait until the value is less than 10, then proceed to the next step. This will take approximately 5 minutes.

4) Turn on the mechanical pump, pre-pump, energize the turbomolecular pump, turn it on, switch the vacuum gauge switch to the V2 position and pump to less than 2 for about 20 minutes.

(5) After the turbomolecular pump reading reaches 250, turn off the pre-pumping, open the front unit and the high level valve to continue vacuuming, and vacuum to a certain level before the right side high vacuum gauge can be opened. Observe the vacuum level. When the vacuum level reaches 2×10-3, it can be turned on.

2 Shutdown sequence

1) Turn off the high vacuum gauge and the molecular pump.

2) When the molecular pump shows 50, shut down the high level valve, the pre-stage and the mechanical pump in sequence, which takes about 40 minutes.

3) When it falls below 50, turn off the maintenance pump again.

Vacuum Coating Equipment Applications #

• CNC cutting tools: all kinds of milling cutters, taps, drills, hobbing cutters, broaches, blades, die-cutting knives
• Various types of molds: stamping molds, molding molds, die-casting molds, etc.
• Precision parts: all kinds of transmission, wear-resistant and other precision parts, without increasing the size of the workpiece.
• Functional films: medical sterilization, insulation and conductivity, high temperature anti-oxidation, etc., without increasing the size of the workpiece or with wear-resistant requirements
• Architectural hardware: bathroom hardware (e.g. faucets), door locks, door handles, bathroom, door locks, hardware hinges, furniture, etc.
• Watchmaking: Coatings and crystals that can be used on cases and straps.
• Other hardware: leather hardware, stainless steel tableware, eyeglass frames, knives, molds, etc.
• Large workpieces: car wheels, stainless steel plates, signboards, sculptures, etc.
• Stainless steel tubes and plates (various surfaces)
• Furniture, lighting, hotel appliances
• Locks, pulls, bathroom hardware, golf heads, stainless steel cutlery, blood and other hardware products are plated with super hard decorative film.
• Glasses, jewelry and other accessories plated with super wear-resistant decorative (gold and silver) nano-films, nano-films and nano-composite films.

Maintenance methods #

Vacuum coating equipment needs to clean the studio once for every 200 times of coating process. Regularly calibrate all kinds of sensing equipment, instrumentation, vacuum pumps, and replace consumables such as seals and resistance wires. Periodic and institutionalized maintenance of vacuum coating equipment is one of the core elements of stable quality of vacuum coating equipment.