There are many coating methods of vacuum coating machine. Different workpieces and coating layers are coated with different technological requirements, and the coating methods are different. Currently, the commonly used coating technologies in the market include vacuum evaporation, sputtering and ion plating (hollow cathode ion plating, hot cathode ion plating, arc ion plating, reactive ion plating, radio frequency ion plating and DC discharge ion plating). These common coating technologies are often used in daily life, and they are merged as follows.

The first type: electron beam evaporation:

Electron beam evaporation is to use the focused electron beam to heat the evaporation source to evaporate and deposit on the surface of the substrate to form a thin film.

Features: Vacuum environment; The evaporation source material needs to be heated and melted; The substrate is also at a high temperature; The evaporated gas is controlled by the magnetic field, so as to control the thickness of the formed coating.

The second type: sputter deposition.

Sputtering is a thin film deposition technology associated with gas glow discharge. There are many sputtering methods, such as DC sputtering, RF sputtering and reactive sputtering, while magnetron sputtering, intermediate frequency sputtering, DC sputtering, RF sputtering and ion beam sputtering are widely used.

Features: The vacuum chamber is filled with inert gas (such as argon) needed for discharge, and a large number of positive ions are generated by ionization of gas molecules under the action of high-voltage electric field. Charged ions are accelerated by a strong electric field, and a high-energy ion stream is formed to bombard evaporation source materials (called targets). Under the bombardment of ions, atoms of evaporation source materials will leave the solid surface, sputter onto the substrate at high speed and be deposited into thin films.

The third type: RF sputtering

The frequency of RF sputtering is about 13.56MHz. It does not need a hot cathode and can be sputtered at lower air pressure and lower voltage. RF sputtering can deposit not only metal films, but also insulating dielectric films of various materials, so it is widely used.

The fourth type: arc ion plating

Cathode arc technology is to ionize the target into an ionic state by low voltage and high current under vacuum conditions, so as to complete the deposition of thin film materials. This technology has higher ionization rate of materials and better film performance.

The fifth type: filtered cathode arc

Filtration arc (FCA) is equipped with an efficient electromagnetic filtration system, which can filter out macro-large particles in the plasma generated by arc source. Therefore, the prepared film is very compact, flat and smooth, with good corrosion resistance and strong binding force with the body.

The sixth type: ion beam

In ion beam processing, under the vacuum condition, the electron beam is first generated by the electron gun, and then introduced into the ionization chamber which has been evacuated and filled with inert gas to ionize the low-pressure inert gas. Cations extracted from the negative electrode are accelerated, bundled and other steps, and ions with a certain speed are obtained and projected onto the material surface, resulting in sputtering effect and injection effect. Because ions are positively charged, their mass is thousands and tens of thousands of times higher than that of electrons, so ion beams have greater impact kinetic energy than electron beams, and are processed by microscopic mechanical impact energy. These six vacuum coater coating processes are common in daily life and the most widely used, which basically cover the coating process of the whole coating industry.