Designer coats: General Industry Coverage

Tailoring the phases, morphology and composition of coatings enables cutting tool designers to enhance a tool’s properties and effectiveness. Sulzer Metaplas GmbH introduced the modular Metaplas-DOMINO machine to allow those designers to more carefully adjust the coating microstructure and achieve the desired results, according to Volker von der Heide, head of systems sales for the equipment manufacturer and coating company. “This gives the possibility for new coating architectures because you can design coatings in a totally new way,” he said.

According to von der Heide, the new coating architectures are partly achieved as a result of HIPAC (High-Ionization Plasma-Assisted Coating) technology, which combines the company’s HCPMS (High-Current Pulsed Magnetron Sputtering) and power-etching AEGD (Arc-Enhanced Glow Discharge) technologies. That combination provides high ionization of not only the metals sputtered, or deposited, onto the substrate, but also the sputtering argon gas, producing a denser coating with fewer defects than one deposited without a high-ionization gas, von der Heide noted. “If you also have high ionization of the working gas, then the sputtering efficiency is much higher,” he said, noting that AEGD provides high ionization of the gas.

Courtesy of Sulzer Metaplas

The Metaplas-Domino machine includes multiple modules that allow coating technologies to be combined to create hybrid designs.