Advanced Tinkering - 2023-12-02
In today's video, I'll be using my vacuum chamber to vaporize metals like copper and silver, applying them to glass surfaces and 3D-printed parts. This coating process is known as thermal evaporation and falls under the umbrella of Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD). If you need custom circuit boards, 3D printed parts, or CNC-machined components, visit PCBWay: https://www.pcbway.com/ Join my Patreon and support my projects! Your contribution means the world to me and helps bring my ideas to life. I truly appreciate your support! https://www.patreon.com/AdvancedTinkering Huygens Optics: https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics AGS-Braunschweig: https://www.ags.tu-bs.de/ Sources fort he pictures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_vapor_deposition https://voc-vacuum.com/en/virtual-leaks/
I think some of the surface finish issues you encountered at the start might also be due to boiling the material too quick, which ends up flinging some tiny drops of metal at your target as well. I encountered something similar during my master's thesis with a commercial evaporator in a cleanroom.
You are definitely right! When evaporating the silver for the first time, I raised the temperature too fast and I could see the metal spatter a bit.
When using the copper, I raised the temperature slower and and coating was a lot better. But you could still see some of the contaminations that came from the glass.
I wonder if you acid etch (or sandblast) the glass a small amount if the metal would hold on better, less likely to scratch or peal off.
I think I will try that.
Yup, you want it hot but not actively boiling the metals. Are you planning on using your chamber to sputter coat as well as thermal evaporation? Maybe even try your hand at building an E beam evaporator. Then you could do nonmetallic coatings of stuff that would react with the boats. Happy tinkering.
Yes, electron beam evaporation is also planned. But I would have to do a lot lore research about the design.
Watching metal get deposited on those glass slides in real time was amazing.
We use Polyimide (Kapton) tape all the time with our PVD setups. Additionally, certain materials tend to "spit" when you ramp the power at too high of a rate. The shutter should be effective in reducing that issue, but I would try and ramp up the power slowly initially to avoid those spots you see on some of your depositions.
Yes, I definitely ramped up the temperature too fast when evaporating the silver. I could see it "spit". When evaporating the copper I raised the temperature slowly and did not get those spots on the glass surface.
How do you prepare the glass surface before coating it? And which metals do adhere best to glass surfaces in your experience?
Thanks a lot for the information!
@@AdvancedTinkering Ideally, we follow an RCA clean procedure. Though you can usually get away with Acetone/IPA/DI w/ ultrasonication. Cr and Ti both work really well as adhesion layers for SiO2. Generally, we find that Ti is best for Si and Cr for SiO2
Nice video. You did a great job on the build. And what a clever thermal evaporation source design!😊
I'm very glad you liked the video! Even though it wasn't nearly as detailed as yours.
Yes, I got the design for the thermal evaporation source from a brilliant video about PVD ;)
When i was using thermal evaporation at university, we used glass wool over the evaporated sample in combination with shutter to reduce sample contamination. It is amazing what you can do in a home lab :)
Nice! This is well into Applied Science territory in terms of coolness.
Thank you! I'm a great fan of him so that's a huge compliment!
As a new silversmith and enamel artist this is like magic to me. I had no idea this was possible until this week
Huygens Optics is a fine channel. Lots of really great stuff over there.
Huygens optics is awesome, he does a lot of PVD for his first surface mirrors
I must admit, I very much envy your high-vacuum setup man, everything looks so refined and professional! I had a basic vacuum setup a while back that could get down below 100 microns, but it was very finicky, and the pump died some time ago. Keep up the good work, can't wait to see what you use this for in the future!
I use a lot of the same fittings and components at work, can confirm this setup looks like a scaled down & simplified version of an industry equivalent PVD chamber, just a lot more manual and less automated.
This is a fantastic video, and a really interesting topic.
Back in the 90s I briefly worked for a company that coated glass using the sputtering process. Mostly I worked in color filters, but spent a couple of weeks testing glass that would act as a light filter for solar panels in satellites. (blocking most of the sun's full spectrum light, except for a narrow band, preventing the solar cell from burning up) That glass was only 0.004" thick, and really easy to break. We also put coating on that would reduce the amount of light reflected from the glass. My job was running the glass pieces through a spectraphotometer to make sure the coating was the exact color, according to customer specifications, cut the glass to shape and discard the pieces that were out of spec. Then environmental testing, which consisted of rubbing the coating with an eraser to make sure the coating didn't peel off.
It's always a special treat to "see" a metal as a gas especially transition metals like copper, silver and gold considering that metals don't typically become gases (at normal atmospheric pressure) unless we reach nearly impossibly high temperatures of well over 2 kilokelvin!
Definitely. I thought about creating a plasma to excite the metal in the gas phase. Or maybe just build a sputtering system.
@@AdvancedTinkering I'm down with that! I'm curious to know what colors metals like say gold and silver are as plasma!
@@AdvancedTinkering I would love to see your experiments with this!
This is one of the most interesting demonstrations I have seen
Thank you! I'm glad you found it interesting.
Love that feedthrough design, awesome stuff!
Thanks! I'm very interested to see how the feedthrough holds up over time.
Many thanks for opening an enterely new and fascinating topic. The field of applications is just endless. For example, I believe the coated goggles can be used for direct sun observations or welding purposes. Further, you could build your own reflecting telescope. Last but not least, if you try to evaporate graphite you should be able to deposit tiny diamonds.
Yes, there are many interesting possibilities. I think the hard part about making optics would be the the precisely ground/shaped glass surface. And I think channels like Huygens Optics are way more capable in that area.
I don't think it will be possible to evaporate graphite. Or do you have any information about that? I would be very interested because I'm thinking about making diamonds via CVD for a long time but it's a pretty involved process.
@@AdvancedTinkering "I don't think it will be possible to evaporate graphite"
Really hard to do if you want to stick to just a crucible. One option would be to use a laser for that: Heat up the carbon with electricity and use a laser for the last push to evaporation. But certainly that is not easy as now you have to deal with all the problems of having high-powered laser-pulses on an evaporating material. Can lead to some nasty splattering.
It's content like this that makes YT great, keep up the great work! That MOT is hot...:)
Thank you! I appreciate hearing that you like the videos!
This is pretty cool. I use to run a very large PVD coating machine via sputtering for coating automotive windshields to reflect sunlight and uv radiation.
Very nice! I had fun evaporating titanium, and you can modulate the color of the deposits by varying the pressure of the chamber-- I got some very beautiful gold-colored layers this way. If you're not too concerned with coating things around your chamber, you might try the much cheaper stranded tungsten wire heaters, wrapping a bit of the desired metal around the tungsten, where it will melt and wick onto the heater wire before evaporating. Another cool experiment I tried was evaporating silver onto paper, and it doesn't take much to become quite conductive. You'd think the rough surface of the paper would prevent this, but it works very well.
Very cool! I also wanted to evaporate titanium to see if I can get some pretty interference colors. Do you remember at which pressures you evaporated the titanium to get the golden colored layers?
Titanium is a reactive "getter" and will pump any reactive gas that strikes it. Used to maintain 10-12 Torr beam transfer lines under vacuum for years.
To get the metal to stick to glass first bake it dry, then deposit a thin layer of titanium on it, then apply the desired metal. ❤
Thanks for the advice! I will try that!
Love your build! Going to try some of your design improvements to my basic thermal evap setup (no cooling, just copper bolts in aluminum base to hold tungsten boat and chamber as ground); love your large chamber!
samy is my hero
That’s a massive high vacuum chamber. Also, Applied Science has video on cleaning glass already, but I guess another one won’t hurt.
Yes, his videos are great. I have seen the one about the cleaning process. I doubt mine will be nearly as detailed as his.
While that's definitely a really large vacuum chamber for someone to have at home, the semiconductor industry utilizes significantly larger chambers (we're talking 60 cubic feet or more) that hold roughly the same pressures. Buuuut the pumps are, of course, much bigger as well.
You can take a low power incandescent lamp and ramp up the voltage to the point where the lamp runs too bright but doesn't melt. after a while, lamp will slowly turn opaque due to tungsten deposition.
In fact, you can easily add 3rd crucible as well, nice design :)
You are right! I didn't think about that possibility.
that copper coating looks beautiful
Neat setup. I have a smaller chamber with a smaller Varian diffusion pump I used to use to coat Mylar with about 150 angstroms of gold to make condenser microphones. I haven’t made them for quite a while though.
this would be so cool for DIY parabolic reflectors, especially since you could probably resin 3d print the reflector shape and then coat it after, youd have so much creative freedom
This turbomolecular is sick 😮
This is absolutely amazing! Really inspiring!!!!
10:50 To use vinyl cut lettering, you should cut the lettering with the backing paper still attached, remove the unneeded parts while the cut letting is still on the backing paper and only then use transfer tape to transfer it to final surface. Even then the "remove the unneeded parts" is a bit tedious but with a flexible surface and much less stickiness, it's still much easier.
Greetings from Hildesheim, great vid!
Greetings back! Thank you!
Trade secrets.
Very nice👏
Great video! The Huygens optics guy's channel is awesome too, was happy to find it mentioned here. Huygens I think should be pronounced Dutch, as the physicist Huygens, and would read roughly as 'hau-kchens' as a German reader, with the kch sound being a typical Dutch throaty g sound as the 'ch' in the German 'auch' :D
Thank you!
Ah, that's good to know :D thanks!
Love it! I used similar (Hysol 1C) 2-component epoxy to make some custom holders for weird shaped samples for a e-beam/thermal evaporator. Super low outgassing. Nice video overall.
Those are realy nice results.
Thank you!
Good work! Very cool.
Wow! 20mm copper rod! I managed to fit two rods in single KF25 flange :) You have very nice setup!
Thank you!
Amazing stuff at a home DIY workshop... Hats off, and keep up the good work!
It requires a little more attention to safety but you might try piranha solution for cleaning glass. Just make sure that you don't try with anything organic!
Awesome results and video! Thanks for taking the time to also share this with us.
Great video, thank you. A video including a piezoelectric sensor that measures the layer thickness would be awesome, I like that idea
Hello. You could try to use a special formulation of transfer tape using low outgassing acrylic compound like 3M 9703.
We use it on spacecrafts all the time and it works really well for lightweight components which needs to be electrically conducive.
That's a sweet chamber
Great video! Gut Gemacht!
Danke!
Since the vinyl tape was able to survice the process, you can probably simply use thin slices of viny tape to fix leaks in the coating container to safeguard your vacuum chamber.
Tip, use mixture of little bit battery h2so4 and alume Aqueous solution on aluminum or ceramic pot and heat it untill broken steel bit desolved in the copper without doing anything to Aluminium brass or copper metals.
You could combine this with simple electroplating to do some cool things.
For example you could coat plastic 3D prints with some cheap but conductive copper, and then nickel plate them.
Then you can buff out the nickel plating to get that perfect shine you want.
If you heat your object the coatings hold a lot better. A way to clean is to coat the object with a thin oil film and evaporate it in heat and vacuum.
Good job
Thank you!
If you want metals like copper, silver, platinum, gold tostick to glass, flash a very thin layer of aluminum first, vent (it will rapidly become aluminum oxide), and change to the metal desired. The aluminum oxide acts as a "glue".
Beautiful! ❤🙌🏻
@MaxWithTheSax - 2023-12-02
Some might say 20mm copper is overkill. But can you even call it a high amperage pass through if it can't handle currents in the kA range?
@blackturbine - 2023-12-03
Not only that but you would need lot thicker conductors in vaccum.
Any conductor has losses and in a vaccum it would be able to overheat.
I didn't research this I'm just going off from vaccum being thermal insulator
@MaxWithTheSax - 2023-12-03
@@blackturbine I calculated the max current with the assumption that the water cooling is used. But even without it the heat will conduct through the walls of the pass through and it should be fine.
@blackturbine - 2023-12-03
@@MaxWithTheSax i commented before I realized he was using water cooling but yeah with copper being so thick it would conduct enough heat away passively.
Thank you for responding :]