Coatings
We have a unique position in the thin film coating industry: Large chambers & cleanrooms, custom job environment, large & one-of-a-kind hardware, significant space heritage & infrastructure and finally on-site, world class metrology. SOC's coating laboratory is fully equipped to provide for the most stringent coating needs with adjacent measurement facilities to confirm coating specifications have been satisfied.
Capabilities
- VDA of Composite and Plastic Spaceflight Hardware (RF & Thermal Control)
- Optical Coatings up to 2.5m
- Web coating
The Coatings Process
SOC's specialized coating systems use two different processes
- Vacuum deposition
- Pigmented paints with controlled pigment/binder constituents.
Vacuum deposited coatings are manufactured using several different techniques; standard in the coating industry:
- Resistively heated thermal evaporation
- Electron beam evaporation
- Ion beam assisted deposition.
These processes are used to produce protected metal mirrors, low emittance thermal shields, lenses, bandpass filters, graphite antenna coatings, and high temperature coatings for composite structures and dielectric mirrors. SOC has a number of contracts with the US Government, defense and commercial related firms for the development and application of specialty coatings.
Coatings has been developed at SOC for :
- EMI/EMP shielded windows
- Satellite antenna coatings with controlled solar absorptance and emittance.
- Micro-optic, directionally coated, IR spectrally tailored low emissive coating.
- Visually reflective, microwave transparent coating.
- High durability exo-atmospheric IR coating
- High efficiency silver based lens coating.
- Satellite telescope low emittance thermal protective coating
- Signature/thermal control of ground-based and airborne vehicles
With adjacent measurement facilities that confirm coating specifications, SOC's coating laboratory is fully equipped to provide for the most stringent coating needs.
SOC also manufactures thermal/signature control paints using optimization capability of SOC's ScatCad analysis tools for pigment design, the laboratory instrumentation for database development and coating verification. Typical applications for this type of coating are for signature/thermal control of ground-based and airborne vehicles.
