The Research On The Characteristic Of PBAIP Sheath

Pulsed bias arc ion plating, developed in recent ten years, is a newly promising film deposition technique. Compared with conventional arc ion plating, it has more advantages such as low deposition temperature, low residual stress, fine grain and macro-particles cleaning. It is thus suitable for deposition of high-quality multilayer films. But, the theory about pulsed bias sheath is still not enough powerful to instruct the experiments. Moreover the beneficial research loop has not been built that theory is applied to experiments and in return it is improved with the feedback of experiments.In this paper, based on theoretical calculation of pulsed-plasma sheath, two group experiments have been designed and finished to confirm the sheath theory is good for experiment. Also the experiments' results have been analyzed and discussed.First of all, self-consistent sheath dynamics models of radio frequency and pulse plasma have been built for insulated substrate. The characteristics of pulsed-plasma sheath were investigated. The influence of pulsed frequency, duty cycle and bias value on charging effect and ion energy distributions (IEDs) was also studied. The models include the equation of ion continuity, momentum equation, Poisson equation and equivalent circuit equation, through which the relationship can be determined between insulated substrate surface potential, charge density and sheath thickness. The simulation result showed that the IEDs exhibit double peaks character. The IEDs of pulsed-plasma are almost intermittent, so the ions tend to get homogeneous energy.Then, two group experiments have been designed and then finished:(1) (TiNb)N film was deposited on high-speed steel, which is a conductor;(2) TiO₂ film was deposited on Si(100) substrate and 316L stainless steel substrate respectively. The phase composition and surface morphology of the films was characterized with XRD and SEM. The influence of pulsed bias on the film's phase composition and surface morphology was investigated.Lastly, the conclusions are summarized as followed:With the pulsed bias increasing, the ions get more energy, which enable the ions overcome the energy barrier to form the compound;thus the film grow into deferent micro-structure and phase compositions at deferent pulsed bias. To some degree, It has been proved that our theoretical calculation of pulsed-plasma sheath is valuable for the experiments.