Engineered Coatings

DCC is a diamond coating that is produced in CVD chambers built by RobbJack’s sister company, Crystallume.

Crystallume first developed the method to adhere diamond to carbide tools in a joint NCMS project that ended in 1993, and further developed the technology during a 3-year NIST funded project with Boeing, General Motors, Ford, and Hughes, which was completed in 1998.

This is the product known as DCC (Diamond Coated Carbide) that has been produced for the past 20 years. At the Santa Clara, CA facility Crystallume runs 10 diamond coating systems 24/7, producing more CVD diamond than any other company in the world.

Our Black Widow DLC coating is tailored to have a combination of lubricity, abrasion, and corrosion resistance. Being a type of dry lubricant film, it performs well in bearing and gear applications where two mating surfaces have sliding contact. On cutting tools, DLC has worked very well with abrasive material such as wood and aluminum. Black in color and resistant to fingerprinting, this is also an ideal coating for cosmetic purposes.

In general, hard carbon coatings have a low coefficient of friction and good chemical resistance. The hardness of an HCC can be tailored to match a specific application.

RobbJack’s TiN coating is optimized through a patented process to give you consistent coating properties. It is important to match these coating properties to the application and the quality required.

For applications such as medical instruments or injection molds, the consistency, abrasion resistance, and quality will be most important, while for commodity drills and decorative applications the lowest price per piece may dictate the coating specifications.

These differing properties can be gained through the adjustment of the temperature that the coating is applied at and the total thickness of the coating.

The incorporation of carbon into the film increases its hardness and wear resistance, while lowering its coefficient of friction from the properties of TiN. These properties yield significant lifetime improvement in comparison to TiN coatings. Due to its increase in brittleness, TiCN is deposited as a multilayered coating to have adequate toughness for cutting applications.

TiCN appearance can range from a near-gold appearance, to a copper color, to the silver-blue color typically found in the marketplace. The color depends on the carbon content and other coating processing factors in the composition of the final coating layer.

The development of PVD Aluminum Titanium Nitride based coatings is the most significant advancement in wear coatings since the introduction of Titanium Nitride. The addition of aluminum to the coating not only increases cold and hot hardness, but also can double the maximum operating temperature of AlTiN coated components.

The aluminum in the AlTiN coating converts to aluminum oxide from the heat in these high temperature applications creating a ceramic layer in the coating. The oxidation onset temperature is 900°C, which is one of the highest commercially available oxidation temperatures for a PVD coating.

RobbJack’s AlTiN coating has a violet black color and its hardness properties can be tailored by varying the aluminum content of the coating.