Novel Technologies to be Developed for Thin-Film Deposition

A three-year project awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop novel technologies for depositing thin films is underway.

The contract award is under DARPA’s Local Control of Materials Synthesis (LoCo) program, which is investigating non-thermal approaches for depositing thin-film coatings onto the surfaces of a variety of materials. The objective of the program is to overcome the reliance on high-thermal energy input by examining the process of thin-film deposition at the molecular component level in areas such as reactant flux, surface mobility and reaction energy, among others.

Many current high-temperature deposition processes cannot be used on military vehicles and other equipment because they exceed the temperature limit of the material. The LoCo program will attempt to create new, low-temperature deposition processes and a new range of coating-substrate pairings to improve the surface properties of materials used in a wide range of defense technologies including rotor blades, infrared missile domes and photovoltaics, among others. Read More

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