Grohe - COLOURS

This technology is divided in two major steps:

Pretreatment and PVD coating.

The first step, pretreatment, refers to the thorough

cleaning of the faucets. They are positioned on racks

and hung in cleaning baskets. Now, the faucets

undergo a special cleaning process, using acid &

alkaline cleaning media. This is followed by thorough

drying in a vacuum. After this procedure, the parts are

micro purified and are removed from the cleaning line.

They are then transported into the PVD coating area.

Here, the air is conditioned to about 50 percent relative

air humidity and to an ambient temperature of around

25°C. Here the racks are taken out of the cleaning

baskets and loaded on dedicated PVD racks, which are

then placed on a coating table. After this, the parts get

heat treated in an oven. Here, plastic parts go through

a degasification process. The retention time is at least

three hours. Metal parts are heated up and require at

least one hour. Now a product carrier transports the

dried and heated components into the PVD machine.

The second step is the PVD coating. After the door

of the PVD chamber has been locked, the program-

sequence starts and the target material gets evaporated.

This coating process takes place in a high-vacuum

environment and consists of three steps: first the

substrate cleaning, then the primer coating and at last

the color coating. To realize different colors, reactive

gasses like nitrogen and acetylene are added to the

target material zirconium. The time required for a

coating depends on the process and takes between

one and two hours. After the coating, the table gets

finally moved out of the PVD machine via the product

carrier. In the last step, every product is carefully

controlled for defects before they are packaged and

delivered to stock.

GROHE StarLight

Chrome

GROHE PVD

10x more scratch resistance

3x more surface hardness

Nickel

Brass

Nickel

Brass

Chrome