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and heterogeneous reaction. These chemical issues are very often not simple even to
chemists. However, with the use of on-line monitoring and diagnostic tools (as
described in Section 10) together with the process modelling of the thermodynamics,
kinetics and mass transport of the CVD process, these have helped to unveil the
chemistry and uid dynamics in the CVD process and provide a better understanding of the chemical reactions and rate controlling steps. Moreover, the use of
single chemical precursor source has minimised the CVD process parameters that
needed to be controlled. The development and emergence of simpler and cost eective CVD-based techniques ESAVD and CCVD have also contributed to a wider
use of CVD in coating technology, and has opened up new application areas that
might have previously limited by the high cost/limitation of conventional CVD and
PVD.

15. Conclusions and outlook

This article has presented a review of the current and potential development of
CVD processes and their applications. It has revealed that CVD is an important
technique for the deposition of highly pure lms and coatings with good conformal
coverage. In addition, variants of CVD processes have been developed to cater for
specic applications. These include plasma enhanced CVD, photo assisted CVD,
and metalorganic CVD for the low temperature deposition which are useful in
semiconductors; atomic layer expitaxy for the controlled growth of epitaxial lms
and monoatomic layer deposition; pulsed injection MOCVD enables the deposition
superlattice and multilayer thin lms with complex stacking at the nm scale level;
electrochemical vapour deposition for the deposition of dense ionic or electronic
conducting oxide lms onto porous substrates; chemical vapour inltration for the
densication of porous ceramic preform during the manufacturing of ceramic
matrix material for ceramic bre reinforced composites.
These various CVD processes oer the widest range of thin lm and coating
applications than any other deposition or coating techniques. Examples of established application areas of CVD include semiconducting thin lms, protective coatings for wear, corrosion, oxidation, chemical reaction and thermal shock resistance,
ceramic bres and CMCs. The capability of CVD processes to use any precursor
sources and processing conditions have led to the development of new and advanced
materials. These include synthetic diamond lms, (which is dicult to be deposited
using PVD or other techniques), superlattice and multilayer thin lms, nanostructured
materials, free standing shapes and rapid prototyping,
The development of emerging low cost, non vacuum CVD-based techniques (e.g.
aerosol assisted CVD and ame assisted CVD), oers the potential to be scaled up
for large area or mass production. This will widen the scope of engineering applications of CVD that might have previously limited by the high cost/limitation of
conventional CVD.
Although CVD-based methods generally involve complex chemistry and chemical
process, the use of on-line monitoring and diagnostic tools, together with the