ZeCoat has developed a battery-powered deposition technology to meet the needs of ground and space-based astronomy projects.

In this technology demonstration, an array of three battery-powered deposition (BPD) units are each connected to twenty 100-watt car head lamps to simulate a 2,000 watt tungsten evaporation filament loaded with aluminum.

We warm the filaments up for about 3-minutes and then ramp up the power during deposition and then back down again.  The shutter covering the evaporator only opens during peak power and then closes again before the power goes back down.

The system is controlled via remote and is fully programmable.

Each BPD unit is enclosed in a vacuum vessel capable of ultra-high-vacuum pressure.

As the diameter of an optic gets larger, more BPD units are added to the array.  This results in a uniform coating across any large-scale optics.

The diameter of the coating is only limited by the vacuum-chamber size.

The power distributed to each load is controlled via computer programming and was precisely determined to warm up aluminum before evaporation occurs.  

In our testing, deposition rates as fast as 400-angstroms per second have been achieved.  

At peak power, there are more than 500 amps being delivered to the test array.