New developments of plasma activated high-rate electron beam evaporation for large surfaces

PVD technologies are well established in industrial use. Especially cold cathode arc evaporation is well known as a very effective technology for the coating of tools and of various engine parts with hard coatings. For large area coating onto metal strips and large metal sheets higher deposition rate and better layer thickness homogeneity would be desirable. Recently developed PVD technologies, especially plasma activated electron beam evaporation processes, opened a fresh ground to fit these called requirements in a better way. A lot of hard coating materials like silica, alumina, chromium nitride, titanium and tungsten carbide as well as metal containing diamond like carbon can be deposited with these new technologies onto large areas. The deposition rate depends on the layer material and is in the range between some ten nanometers per second up to some hundreds of nanometers per second. The achieved layer properties are comparable to conventional produced hard coatings. The paper gives an overview about the new developed technologies and their applications especially in the field of hard coatings. First results of investigations of the layer properties will be shown. Finally, an outlook on the potential applications of the new technologies will be presented.