Self-Healing of PVD-Coatings

Abstract

The work is devoted to the study of the specific features of the structure of vacuum ion-plasma coatings, called by the authors substructural defects. Formed during the deposition of coatings of various compositions by the mechanism of helical growth, these surface crystalline formations, after reaching a certain size, spontaneously extruded (pushed out) from the coating. The cavities (niches) remaining at the site of the defect are filled (healed) by the deposited ions in the process of further growth of the coating. On the basis of thermodynamic analysis, theoretical estimates of the extrusion conditions were obtained in the work, which give a satisfactory agreement between the calculated and experimental data.