IVRESS/EBPVD

The Electron Beam Physical Vapor Deposition (EBPVD) coating process is used to apply ceramic and metallic thin films to critical components which require precise control over the coating thickness and physical properties. The process is primarily used to coat jet and gas power turbines blades, vanes, and other components with a temperature and wear resistant coating. It is also used in other industries such electronics, photonics, and medical industries, to provide coatings with specific electric conductance, optical properties, and biocompatibility/chemical properties, respectively. EBPVD is performed in a vacuum chamber with the parts moving (rotating and translating) with one or more electron-beam-melted sources emitting the coating molecules.

IVRESS/EBPVD is a software tool which uses a fast ray-tracing algorithm for predicting the EBPVD coating thickness and quality over complex geometry parts. The coating quality is the degree to which the coating is deposited by rays normal to the surface. The main benefit of IVRESS/EBPVD is reducing the EBPVD coating process design time (for the motion program and fixtures/masks) for a certain part. This cost includes the cost of coating test parts and then physically cutting and measuring the coating thickness for actual parts to validate that the correct desired coating thickness is obtained.

IVRESS/EBPVD Features

User-friendly spreadsheet user-interface for defining the parts, fixtures, arm/port positions, coater motion recipe, and cloud shape/intensity.
Fast ray tracing algorithm to predict the instantaneous coating thickness and quality distribution over the parts. Those are then integrating over time to obtain the total quantities. The ray tracing algorithm takes into account the parts geometry, shadowing from parts and/or masks, source angular intensity distribution, and the part motion relative to the source.
Supports multiple coating sources. Each source can be discretized using 1 to n points.
The shape of vapor cloud is modelled using a COS ^N power distribution.
Supports complex part motion programs including rotation and oscillation.
Virtual-reality based interactive post-processor, including:
- Coloring the parts using coating thickness or quality.
- Cross-section graphs of the coating thickness or quality over a part's cross-section.