Abstract
A plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process is presented, along with the problem : estimating the surface temperature of a substrate to be coated, an important parameter influencing the quality of the deposit. A mathematical model (MM) was developed, taking into account heat exchanges within the process, to estimate the latter (not directly accessible by measurement). The study of the MM was divided into two parts in order to dissociate two thermal effects: the heating resistor and the plasma medium. An analysis of sensitivity analysis of the MM, using an original tool (the numerical design of experiments), made possible to evaluate the influence of parameter uncertainty on the MM. It highlighted the essential role of certain parameters, two of which (emissivity, convection) needed to be identified with an inverse method.The inverse method used the conjugate gradient regularization method. The final part of the work was devoted to estimating the plasma heat input to the substrate. Then, when the two thermal effects are combined, the MM data were compared with the experimental data.