Product designers may decide to evaluate other coating techniques because they want to extend product life cycles or improve upon a specific coating characteristic. Regardless of a company's reason for checking out electroplating alternatives, you will need to be prepared to test the end result. To properly test a product requires a solid understanding of how it was made and coated. The following information should help you confidently respond to a product engineer whose design calls for a titanium aluminum nitride coating using physical vapor deposition or hard chrome plus nitrogen implantation using plasma source ion implantation. Even though the testing devices remain the same, remember that if an electroplating alternative makes it from the drawing board to the production floor, that quality-control documentation will most likely need to be updated, especially in the area of acceptable values.
Line of sight means that only visible surfaces are coated.
The two principle PVD processes are evaporation and sputtering. A combination of evaporation and sputtering is called ion plating. The evaporation process is similar to boiling water on a stove, except that the coating material is heated in a vacuum chamber. PVD can be run at relatively low temperatures, less than 500 C for high-speed steel or less than 250 C for 440C bearing steel. PVD is also popular for coating micro electronics, he added.