Diamond-Like Carbon (DLC) chemical vapor deposition technology: Characterization of DLC nano-layers and artificial neural networks for process modelling
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Diamond-like carbon (DLC) is obtained cooling or quenching high energy precursive carbons on relatively cold surfaces. This deposition process can be performed by several methods as, for instance, by pulsed laser ablation, cathodic arc, ion beam or plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD). The speed of the deposition process does not allow the material to grow in the cubic crystalline geometry form as for the synthetic diamond production process. Therefore, the resulting DLC film has no long-range crystalline order. This characteristic allows obtaining flexible coatings with mechanical properties similar to that of diamond. The DLC-coating technology is nowadays widely used in medicine (brachytherapy, coating of blood-contacting surfaces etc.) [1,2,3], informatics (as protective material for hard-drives), tribology to prevent wear, solar cells technology [4] and in industry [5]. The properties of the final coating can be modified by doping DLC with elements such as nitrogen, silicon and oxygen, fluorine or metal atoms [6, 7]. Nitrogen incorporation has been used to improve field emission properties of DLC films [8]. One particular class of modified DLC coatings is that of diamond-like nano-composite films consisting of two amorphous interpenetrating networks, a diamond-like network and a silicon-oxide like network. nano-composite DLC films with SiOx content exhibit enhanced fracture toughness, high surface hardness, low compressive stress and high thermo mechanical stability [9, 10 ]. |
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