Technique developed for USP laser deposition onto diamond-like coatings

Ii, Finland - Finnish coating technology specialist Picodeon has developed a technique for depositing diamond-like films onto a wide range of substrates using its patented ultra-short pulsed laser deposition (US PLD) technology.

Diamond-like coatings create superhard surfaces (greater than 40 Gpa) with a low coefficient of friction and excellent coating adhesion. The US PLD process uses a high laser pulse repetition rate and a fan-shaped plasma bloom that enables high production rates and makes feasible the industrial coating of large surfaces at film thicknesses down to nanoscale.

Applications for diamond-like coatings range from machine tooling components to wear components for medical, optical, and sensor applications.

"Any components that need to have the highest possible hardness or wear-resistance can achieve improved lifecycles, greater heat and pressure resistance and/or improved performance with diamond-like coatings," said Picodeon CEO Marko Mylläri. "Our US PLD deposition process can deliver the exact surface defined by our customers' engineers because of the high level of tuning enabled by our process."

Picodeon’s US PLD is a cold ablation technology that works across a vast range of coating materials and substrates. By adjusting processing parameters, the structure and properties of the coating can be tailored to the requirements of the application, even for nanostructure-scale surface coatings.

The ultrashort pulse laser deposition technology delivers very high coating integrity without pinholes, giving improved reliability in applications where through-thickness defects may cause delamination of thin films and serious damage to components.

In addition to diamond-like coatings, US PLD technology, under the tradename Coldab, enables the deposition of carbon nitrides, carbon nitride composites containing PTFE or boron nitride (BN) as well as a wide range of other borides, oxides and precious metal thin films.