New real-time QA procedures for physical vapour deposition coatings for high value manufacturing applications

摘要

Coatings deposited by Physical Vapour Deposition (PVD) offer many advantages for product innovation including: extreme hardness and chemical stability providing excellent wear resistance; low friction; excellent adhesion; and direct application to finished products with no further finishing required. However, although PVD-deposited hard coatings are known to provide many tens or hundreds of percent improvement in the performance of cutting and forming tools used in HVM, they are often disregarded by the HVM supply chain for enhancing product performance.