Diamond-Like Carbon Coating Chamber Automation

Fully Automated vacuum chamber inteded for coating stainless steel with Diamond-Like-Carbon material; mainly used in production of Aerospace components. The main goal of this automation project was to produce a system where a "recipe" process is loaded from an excel spreadsheet and executed while monitoring for data logging, displaying real time status of all peripheral devices and handling alarms. This system was finished in December of 2024 and is used near daily, running recipe processes up to 8 about hours long. The implementation of this automated system has saved an average of 5-6 hours of operator overhead for Acree Technologies.

The most challenging part in building this chamber was regulating the asynchronous behavior of seven concurrent RS-232 ports. Each RS-232 port was responisble for initializing its assigned device, setting values for both recipe delta-time values or operator manual control, and reading actual values every 0.5 seconds. Each power supply or peripheral device communicated using different parameters; some used ASCII protocol, others used raw bytes in a complicated handshake protocol, etc...

One of the most notable tradeoffs we made in the creation of this automated system was using C-More SCADA with the Automation Direct EA9 touch panel instead of a computer with either WonderWare or Ignition. The incorporation of the EA9 touch panel with C-More made it less convenient for the operators to retrieve data; however, isolating the automation system entirely from the desktop computer for programming made the chamber safer and more deterministic for the Diamond-Like-Carbon coating process. The down-side of this method is that it is time consuming to retrieve data stored on the PLC's and injecting new recipes into the code associated with the touch panel.

• Automated 8 Power Supplies, 4 Mass Flow Controllers, Heater, 4 Pneumatic Linear Actuators, 3 Pressure Sensors, Thermocouple, and Motorized Gate Valve
• Cut operator time by ~5-6 hours/day; added robust logging & alarm handling.
• PLC: Automation Direct P-2000 • SCADA: Automation Direct C-More