Contamination of Substrate-Coating Interface Caused by Ion Etching

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors in this paper were focused on the problem of contamination of target surfaces in an industrial deposition system with four magnetron sources. The contamination of the target with the residual products from the etching process can be prevented by a movable shutter located close to the targets, which collects the sputtered species. However, to achieve a reasonable economics of the deposition process, complicated installations (including shielding and shuttering) need to be avoided. In this study, all experiments were performed on samples prepared in the production batches.  It is suitable for publication after modification. Listed below are some comments that might be considered beforehand.

• the authors needs to describe the main results in the abstract (numerically express the differences). Introduction is very long. The conclusions must be improved. Please correct.

• the framework and detailed algorithm for the proposed method should be provided,

• details of test rig components – (range, accuracy),

• please also report their variances (statistical models),

• the results were not at all compared with the research of other authors. It is difficult to evaluate the correctness of the experiments and the results without comparison. It is necessary to find as close as possible research oriented in terms of materials and parameters, because in the present form it is only the presentation of the results. 

• however, my main concern is the novelty of the work, which the authors have not highlighted well enough. Similar works exist in the literature, so that it is not clear what new the current work brings. Perhaps the authors could make a few conclusions based on their results or otherwise express the importance of the results in a relevant context, instead of just presenting them and stating that they agree with those reported earlier by others.

Author Response

Please find attached the author's repla to the review report.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments on coatings-1742288

 

Comment 1: Will the contamination layer at the interface between the substrate

and the coating lead to poor adhesion of the coating?  

Comment 2: What is the contribution of using a double TiAlN coating to identify and

determine composition of contamination layer?

Comment 3: How do authors comment on eliminating the contamination layer for the coating?

Comment 4: Figure 11: Where is CrN?

Comment 5: There is spelling error in caption of figure 6(b) “nodulare defects”. It should be corrected as “nodular defects”.

Author Response

Please find attached author's report to the review report.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

 Accept in present form