A Survey of Coating Technologies in Japanese Small and Medium Enterprises

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in manufacturing industry, because the high level of technology and skills they are possessing strongly support the current coating industry in Japan. In recently, the coating process becomes more important because coating process can add several functions (e.g. wear resistance, corrosion resistance, heat resistance, etc.) by coating various applications. Figure 1 shows the number of SMEs vs. coating thickness. In Japan, SME is determined when capital is less than 300 million yen (about US$24,000) or number of regular workforce is less than 300 persons. There are more than 2000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) engaged in electro-plating. As for thermal spraying and physical vapor deposition/chemical vapor deposition (PVD/CVD), there are more than 70, and 45 SMEs existing in Japan, respectively. Since these coating processes are occasionally competed, and occasionally help each other, the technological level of each coating process has been getting higher and higher day by day. Considering the mechanical engineering field, these three coating field are very important and are well used, therefore, questionnaire was carried out about these coating processes. On the other hand, in Japan, there are many public technical public