The Essential Guide to Durable Color PVD Coatings
Enhance and differentiate consumer products with stunning, durable metallic physical vapor deposition (PVD) finishes.
PVD color coatings enhance both the appearance and durability of products. Manufacturers add these coatings to products ranging from faucets and other home products to automotive trim, sporting goods, surgical tools, consumer electronics, and jewelry. These coatings come in a wide range of metallic colors, including shades of black, graphite, chrome, stainless steel, nickel, gold, copper, bronze, and blue. In addition to stunning colors, PVD coatings provide excellent wear and corrosion resistance.
Color PVD coatings are used on many consumer products and to differentiate medical devices and machine tooling. Applications include:
- Plumbing products & door hardware: Faucets, bath fixtures, doorknobs, and appliance/furniture trim
- Automotive: Interior and exterior trim
- Medical and dental devices: Used to differentiate surgical and dental tools and instruments.
- Outdoor sports products such as golf clubs, knives and blades, and firearms.
- Other applications for color PVD coatings include consumer electronics and jewelry.
Black
Cool Graphite
Graphite
Chrome
Stainless Steel
Nickel
Gold
Rose Gold
Dark Copper
Light Bronze
Bronze
Dark Bronze
Blue Black
Vivid Blue
Purple
To meet consumer demand, VaporTech systems create coatings in dark black, blue-black, graphite, and shades of gray. Our black PVD coatings look beautiful and add a durable layer of protection to parts and products. Common black PVD applications include faucets, doorknobs, and other fixtures, interior and exterior automobile trim, medical devices, blades and firearms, and other consumer products such as luxury watches.
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VaporTech i-Series™ PVD coating systems are right-sized, competitively priced, high-quality PVD machines have been coating consumer products for more than 30 years.
i-Series systems:
- Deposit both PVD and DLC coatings in the same chamber.
- Use a lower temperature cathodic arc process (LTAVD®) to coat metal and plated plastic parts with a thin, uniform color.
- Are designed for simple maintenance and a low coating cost per batch.
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Most PVD color coatings are zirconium-, titanium-, or chromium-based. The PVD coating process uses one of these metals as a solid source (called a target) and adds specific inert and reactive gases to deposit coatings.
The PVD process takes place in a vacuum chamber, utilizing ionized species (plasma) to remove material from the target, atom-by-atom. The coating is then deposited on products, creating a thin, bonded metallic finish.
Links:
- A brief introduction to deco coatings (short video)
- The benefits of zirconium-based color PVD coatings (blog post)
This chart estimates a typical coating cost-per-part for a durable decorative finish, including all consumables. Consumables include electricity, metal “target” material used for coating, and process gases.
