SBIR Phase I:Effectively-Thick Coating of High-Wear Surfaces with Application to Cutting Tools

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop an effectively-thick coating (ETC) technology for machine tool applications. This technology will provide an effective thickness that is 5-20 times thicker than that of traditional coating while abating delamination issues that currently limit thickness. The approach is to micromachine the cutting tool to form a specific pattern followed by the deposition of coating via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) or physical vapor deposition (PVD) techniques. The broader/commercial impact of this project will be the potential to obtain much thicker coating for machine tool, thus extend its lifetime and reduce costs. One of the challenges in the application of machine tool coating is that thin coating is usually worn away before the other parts of the machine tool are compromised, resulting in high cost. On the other hand, the coating tends to delaminate from the substrate when the thickness is over a critical point, making it very difficult to deposit coating with desired thickness. This technology will offer a coating with much higher effective thickness and is expected to extend the machine tool life time by a factor of 2.