"Siltint Industries' production facilities consist of high technology coating plants situated in a clean room environment. This coating base is complemented by a computer controlled cleaning line and purpose built quality area and operated by skilled operators and engineers, so you can be assured that the quality of our coatings will be second to none."

PREPARATION

Each individual substrate type is evaluated to determine whether it is to be hand cleaned or automatically cleaned down our Kerry Ultrasonic plant. Special cleaning and handling techniques are employed throughout this initial stage of preparation as substrate cleanliness is of utmost importance in order to provide a high quality finished product.

Kerry Ultrasonic Cleaning Plant:

We spent a large amount of time working with Kerry Ultrasonic on the design of our cleaning plant. This was to enable the company to clean a large number of different types of substrates down the system. It is totally computer controlled for improved reproducibility of the cleaning and uses Kerry's mark 3 Autotrans Robot carrier to again improve the consistency of the cleaning without manual interruption.

COATING

Leybold APS 904

This equipment enables Siltint to coat a wide range of products that have to be deposited in a cold chamber. The use of the plasma assisted deposition enables the films to be deposited with a denser structure without the need for heat.

For a more detailed explanation of APS technology, click here

The equipment consists of 2 Leybold ESV14 E-Guns within the vacuum chamber and inter-changeable material pocket sizes and can produce a large range of products from single layers to multi-layer coatings (See our products section). The upgraded 10 kV power supply also enables the company to evaporate a large range of materials.

The APS system uses quartz crystal monitoring of the film thickness and Leybold's Leycom IV process controller for excellent reproducibility of the process.

Leybold A700Qs

Siltint also operates Leybold A700Q equipment for producing a range of products. These have a smaller chamber than the APS 904, and are ideal for small batch production.

The machines have different types of E-Guns, enabling versatility in production from single layers to 40 layer coatings.

The machines have top and bottom heaters enabling Siltint to coat glass and plastic substrates (although coatings on plastics are not as durable as the denser coatings produced on the APS 904). They also have quartz crystal thickness monitoring, controlled by Leybold's latest IC5 technology.

Balzers BML 700

This smaller version of the Balzers BAK760 machine uses the BPU420 control system and quartz crystal monitoring of the film thickness. The machine has heaters for glass and plastic lenses and uses a four pot AP & T, E-Gun.

Leybold CCS 250

The latest recruit to Siltint's range of machines uses the very latest technology developed by Leybold. Although mainly designed for the ophthalmic market, our in-house design facility have developed a number of processes for the precision optics market.

It uses a Windows based process controller and quartz crystal monitoring for maintaining reproducibility of the process. With the introduction of Balzers' latest evaporation material formulas comes the ability for all processes to be deposited cold on both glass and plastic substrates. However, also installed is a commonwealth mark I ion source to enable Ion Assisted Deposition (IAD) if required.

Without internal heaters and a small chamber the introduction of a turbo molecular pumping system enables very fast cycle times, ideal for small batch production. <top>

INSPECTION

We inspect every piece of our coated product prior to packing and despatch in lamina flow cabinets to enable examination a clean air environment. A test piece is also measured using a Perkin Elmer Lambda 19 spectrophotometer to check that the coating is within your optical specifications.

Certificate of Conformity (COC)

Each coating run is issued with a Certificate of Conformity (COC) detailing the optical and mechanical specification of the coating. This is your guarantee that the coating meets given specifications.