Skip to main content

Specialized Coatings & Materials Development

Advanced Manufacturing

Return to Livermore Laboratories Home

Advanced Materials Development

With MANTECH’s state-of-the-art diamond turning lathes and precision mills, our highly skilled staff machines custom structures in sizes from 10s of centimeters to sub-millimeter. Our team achieves precision and tolerances at the micron-to-nanometer levels. Components from metals, alloys, plastic and polymers are machined to exacting dimensions. A suite of high-precision metrology tools provides complete documentation of components’ as-built specifications.

Coatings are applied to a wide variety of surfaces and complex geometries 

 

  • MANTECH designs and machines custom sample holders to enable coatings of a wide variety of surfaces and complex geometries

  • MANTECH’s expertise in surface preparation is critical for good film adhesion
    • Chemical surface treatment ​- Acid or base cleaning of surfaces
    • Ex situ, in a plasma etcher, and in situ plasma etching​ in the deposition chamber
       
  • Metals, oxides and nitride films are prepared by e-beam evaporation and sputter deposition
    • Sputter coater is equipped with 3 targets for multilayer and elemental mixture depositions
    • E-beam evaporator with four pockets for multilayers

  • Single- and multi-layer anti-reflective coatings
     
  • Doped and undoped polymer films are deposited using plasma assisted chemical vapor deposition​
     
  • Spin coating and casting on substrates provides polymer solids and films up to one millimeter thickness​
    • Cast solid films can be formed with specified geometrical features​
       
  • Electroplating: Gold up to 100 microns thick electroplated onto conductive surfaces ​
     
  • Bulk polymers can be synthesized in our chemical laboratory
    • Low density solids synthesis using gelation and supercritical drying techniques​
    • Polymers with chemical dopants

Available  Metals

MANTECH Livermore Laboratory’s versatile coating facility includes:

  • E-beam evaporation  and  sputter deposition deposit thin layers of Au, Pd, Al, Cu, Mg, Fe, Gd, Si, Ni, Ti, Cr, and some non-metals onto target components. Quartz crystal monitors (QCM) are integrated into the coaters for in-situ monitoring of coating thickness, which provides nanometer level control.

 

  • Electroplating station is used for gold plating, up to 10s of microns thick.

Ready to Learn More?

Dr. Nour Nijem
Program Manager