Abstract
The low-temperature plasma is commonly used to treat the surfaces of a wide range of substrates. The deposition of layers on the surfaces of conductive substrates may be achieved by various ways.
In comparison with neutral atom deposition, the use of ions has got considerable advantages. The energy of ions and the flux to the substrate can be controlled by the voltage bias and the pressure. in this contribution, the propagation of ions from low-temperature plasma to substrates with uneven surfaces is studied by means of computational simulations.
Instead of simulating the whole system of discharge, sputtering and deposition, this study is devoted to the transport of ions to a complex substrate, which demands the fully three-dimensional approach, independently of the source of plasma. The computational simulations are based on a hybrid model which consists of a fluid and a particle part trying to take advantage from both of them.
The fluid part reaches the global results in a short time, whereas the particle part gives detailed results, such as local energy distributions and transport parameters. The hybrid model achieves the solution by coupling these two parts iteratively.