Effective heat treatment for improvement in diamond-like carbon coatings for biomedical applications

Abstract

The chapter briefly introduces the diamond-like carbon (DLC) coatings, their manufacturing techniques, revenue and applications. The DLC coatings are actively involved in the biomedical industry. Therefore, a dedicated section describes the biocompatibility of these coatings concisely. Different ways for improvement in DLC coatings performance are being researched nowadays, and heat treatment is attractive among them. The chapter introduces a fresh approach of two-step heat treatment method to improve DLC properties. A conventional heat treatment usually reduces the coating properties like sp3 fraction, hardness and increased the friction coefficient, whereas the two-step heat treatment has represented about 20% improvement in hardness and about 10% improvement in toughness simultaneously when deposited on the selected bias voltage.