PVD equipment design: concepts for increased production throughput

It is now widely accepted that plasma-assisted PVD coatings have their strongest foothold in application sectors for which throughput is low and for which coated components have high added value, such as the aerospace industry. These sectors are typically supplied by batch-type coating facilities. This suggests that there is an important gap in the market, i.e. the low cost components found in high volume industries. This has prompted a design study of PVD coating equipment. Predictions are made for the number of selected components which a typical batch production system can process in a given time and the costs associated with that system. An estimation of throughput for a continuous system which has the same size of process chamber as the batch system is also given, and a comparison of the cost per component is made for each. A breakdown of the costs is given for the manufacturing and running of both batch and continuous systems. This is then used to highlight the areas where costs can be reduced in the design and manufacture of continuous coating plants.