Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Does DLC-coated glassware exist?

ave369 - 18-11-2015 at 08:17

Recently I learned of a cool new technology: diamond-like carbon films. These are thin films of what is essentially diamond, opaque or transparent, with which all sorts of stuff can be coated. And immediately I had an idea: if such a coating is applied inside glassware, it will become supremely resistant to all sorts of glass-eating stuff like hydrofluoric acid, hot phosphoric acid, alkalis etc! And it will not be damaged by heating, unlike plasticware. With this sort of films, you can distill hydrofluoric acid in a normal, glass distillation setup!

Does such glassware exist?

careysub - 18-11-2015 at 17:45

Quote: Originally posted by ave369  
Recently I learned of a cool new technology: diamond-like carbon films. These are thin films of what is essentially diamond, opaque or transparent, with which all sorts of stuff can be coated. And immediately I had an idea: if such a coating is applied inside glassware, it will become supremely resistant to all sorts of glass-eating stuff like hydrofluoric acid, hot phosphoric acid, alkalis etc! And it will not be damaged by heating, unlike plasticware. With this sort of films, you can distill hydrofluoric acid in a normal, glass distillation setup!

Does such glassware exist?


I doubt it.

It appears that one weakness of this technology is that it does not form totally impervious barriers in most applications (though extra-thick extra-expensive coating might be possible I imagine).

Instead it forms a surface coating that resists abrasion and surface bonding, a quick literature review on-line turned up no other significant applications beyond that. And OSTI report specifically found that DLC coating did not protect metal from HCl attack, since it formed pits through tiny pores, which then undermine the coating.

Although "enhanced corrosion resistance" is one of the advantages claimed for this technology, virtually all of them are protecting against combined erosion-corrosion processes, on material that already has fairly good corrosion resistance to the environment.

Another problem is that most deposition technologies are "line-of-sight", they use processes that deposit on exposed surfaces, coating the upper inside of an RBF would be a trick.

ave369 - 19-11-2015 at 03:43

Okay, so the technology is not yet mature enough to pull this off. Okay, let's wait patiently.