Improving the Deposition Rate of Multicomponent Coating by Controlling Substrate Table Rotation in a Magnetron Sputtering Process

Physical Vapour Deposition (PVD) technology, particularly magnetron sputtering process, enjoys the competitive advantages of depositing different new generation coatings (e.g., multicomponent, multilayer, graded, composite etc.) on three-dimensional objects (substrate) with excellent mechanical and tribological properties. In an industrial-scale sputtering chamber with a limited number of active magnetron sources (target) on the chamber wall, the density of coating species from different sources would not be uniform everywhere around the chamber. As a result, at a constant speed of rotating substrate table in a single revolution, the instantaneous deposition rate will be highest in front of the active targets and lowest when the substrate moves away from the active targets. In this work, a method of controlling the rotational speed (i.e., slower speed in front of active targets and faster speed in front of inactive targets in a revolution) of a substrate table installed in a magnetron sputtering chamber has been developed in order to improve the deposition rate of a multicomponent TiN+MoSx coating. The mechanical and tribological properties of TiN+MoSx coating have also been characterised to assess the beneficial effects of adding solid lubricant (MoS2) in hard TiN coating.