DLC is beautiful Black DiamondCut for kitchen knives
The DLC innovation for extravagant laser design
What is the black Diamond like Carbon coating on sharp kitchen knives and what advantages does it offer?
Black-coated knives have recently appeared on the European knife market. Supposedly diamond hard and sharp forever. We want to explain what this is really about.
The abbreviation DLC stands for Diamond like Carbon. It is one of the latest developments from the PVD technology. It is a physical vapor deposition process.
Sounds complicated, but has long been a common coating option for metal. In simple terms, a material is vaporized and deposited on a metal in a vacuum.
Black DiamondCut is mysterious and sharp
What makes this new coating so unique is its hardness and durability.
Diamond hard is no exaggeration. In the coating, carbon has been combined in various crystal structures through the complex process.
And what is crystalline carbon but real diamond?
It is the hardest natural mineral to date and therefore by far the hardest surface that can be produced on knives.
Black is sexy and attractive for knife steel
What are the advantages of the so-called Black Diamond coating?
The black high-tech surface brings a whole new look to the knife market.
The black offers an excellent design surface for graphic processing such as knife engraving. The velvety matt of the black layer has a sophisticated and very high-quality appearance.
The cutting properties are improved to the extent that the adhesion of the cut material to the surface is greatly reduced. The blade glides through meat or vegetables, for example, without pressure.
Eternal sharpness, a fantastic dream ?
Eternal sharpness, like eternal youth, is a dream that cannot yet be confirmed. A knife that is used also wears out.
The hard black carbon coating wraps around the entire blade like a sheath. It also encloses the sharpness of the cutting edge. The coating tends to round off the sharply ground cutting edge.
This does not make the cutting edge any sharper. But it does make it more durable. When a chef’s knife is used, it repeatedly comes into contact with robust materials, bones, cartilage or even hard cutting surfaces. This reduces the sharpening quality and angle retention of each blade.
Good chef’s knives are made of high-quality, hardened stainless steel. Hardness is one of the criteria for a long-lasting sharp kitchen tool. The other criterion is the cutting angle. A simple rule of thumb applies here. The steeper the angle, the sharper the knife and the quicker it will dull again. The cutting angle is therefore a compromise between edge retention and sharpness.
Conclusion: Kitchen knives need to be sharpened at some point when they are used. Forever sharp remains a dream.
The fascination of the diamond-like carbon layer on sharp steel
Mechanical properties of DLC
Chemical properties of DLC
The look of DLC
The science behind diamond like carbon coating technology
The DLC layer is a metal-containing, amorphous carbon layer. It consists of the elements chromium and carbon, which are converted into the desired DLC hard material layer via a PVD process.
The base material, in our case mainly carbon, is vaporized by means of an electric arc or a laser beam. The starting material must always be electrically conductive. The starting material is electrically connected as a cathode. The process takes place in a vacuum chamber. The heat input directly creates a concentrated carbon plasma in the form of a cloud. The blade to be coated is rotated in this cloud to achieve a uniform coating.
While in PVD technology the coating material is usually liquefied in solid form and possibly by adding heat, in CVD technology it is added in the gas phase. For example, to produce diamond-like carbon layers (DLC), a hydrocarbon such as acetylene C2H2 can be supplied, which is cracked in the plasma (the aim of cracking is to increase the yield of light fractions) and thus made available for coating.
The sputter process for DLC
By applying an electrical voltage of several 100V between the coating material, which serves as the cathode, and the chamber wall in the vacuum system, which acts as the anode, a gas discharge is ignited. The ions are accelerated by the cathode to such an extent that they detach individual atoms from the surface when they collide with the coating material and are thus transferred to the vapor phase. The materials exposed to this vapor are coated.
The high temperature and the speed of the impact force cause the carbon to crystallize in various microcrystalline lattice structures. These include tetrahedral hydrogen-free amorphous carbon layers that are very similar to diamonds in terms of their properties.
The result is breathtaking BLACK & BEAUTIFUL
Made for future processing by TYPEMYKKNIFE®
