Vacuum Coating

Vacuum coating is a critical process used across a wide range of industries and applications, including optical, ophthalmic, glass, decorative, and protective coatings. Optical coating and ophthalmic coating are often confused, the former relating to the coating of lenses, mirrors, etc. to be used in equipment such as telescopes and night vision googles, whereas the latter is literary the coating of eye-glasses, typically with an anti-reflective coating. Glass coating ranges from large architectural glass coatings (e.g. the gold-looking windows at a casino in Las Vegas) to special glass coating to protect fine art or important documents. Decorative and protective coatings can involve any number of objects such as taillights, door knobs, faucets, trophies and aircraft turbine blades.

Predominantly vacuum coating is enabled by high vacuum pumps such as cryo pumps (optical coating), turbo pumps (glass coating) and diffusion pumps (ophthalmic, decorative and protective coatings). Of course, these are backed by roughing pumps which can range from rotary vane, rotary piston and dry pumps, the latter of which are well suited to the application given the benign nature of the process gases used.