Short cycle decorative hard coating of door hardware and plumbing fixtures for brass, zinc diecast and plastic parts

摘要

Decorative hard coating allows to create highly durable finishes. PVD-coating with the cluster inline concept allows to achieve cycle times of down to 5 minutes. The base materials titanium and stainless steel can be coated directly, but for brass-, zinc diecast-and plastic parts an electroplated metallic base coat is needed. The electroplated base coat protects the substrates from corrosion and for plastics additionally the durability of the surface is improved. The PVD-hard coating is deposited on top of the electroplated layer in order to achieve a specif ic color and an extremely high durablity for the practical use of the parts. PVD-hard coatings made of ZrNx are described for substrates made of brassk zinc diecast and plastic parts. For the different substrate materials the coating temperature has to be adjusted. For coatings brass a temperature of < 200 deg C, for zinc diecast a coating temperature of <150 deg C and for plastics a coating temperature of < 60 deg C has to be adjusted. The properties of the coatings and the characteristics of 3-D-part coating using a single pylon concept are discussed. The deposition of the hard coating material is arranged by sputtering with magnetron cathodes supported bythe ion plating effect. The cluster inline concept with four chambers which are attached to a central chamber allows to produce high quality hard coatings at high volume. Due to the optimization of each chamber of the system concept the optimum hardware configuration is present for each process step. The four chambers are having the functions loading/unloading and heating, etching, sputtering and second sputtering. The concept allows to produce coatings at best economical conditions.