Structure and properties of selected (Cr–Al–N, TiC–C, Cr–B–N) nanostructured tribological coatings

Abstract The paper will present the state-of-art in the process, structure and properties of nanostructured multifunctional tribological coatings used in different industrial applications that require high hardness, toughness, wear resistance and thermal stability. The optimization of these coating systems by means of tailoring the structure (graded, superlattice and nanocomposite systems), composition optimization, and energetic ion bombardment from substrate bias voltage control to provide improved mechanical and tribological properties will be assessed for a range of coating systems, including nanocrystalline graded Cr 1− x Al x N coatings, superlattice CrN/AlN coatings and nanocomposite Cr–B–N and TiC/a-C coatings. The results showed that the superlattice CrN/AlN coating exhibited a super hardness of 45 GPa when the bilayer period Λ was about 3.0 nm. Improved toughness and wear resistance have been achieved in the CrN/AlN multilayer and graded CrAlN coatings as compared to the homogeneous CrAlN coating. For the TiC/a-C coatings, increasing the substrate bias increased the hardness of TiC/a-C coatings up to 34 GPa (at −150 V) but also led to a decrease in the coating toughness and wear resistance. The TiC/a-C coating deposited at a −50 V bias voltage exhibited an optimized high hardness of 28 GPa, a low coefficient of friction of 0.19 and a wear rate of 2.37 × 10 −7 mm 3 N −1 m −1 . The Cr–B–N coating system consists of nanocrystalline CrB 2 embedded in an amorphous BN phase when the N content is low. With an increase in the N content, a decrease in the CrB 2 phase and an increase in the amorphous BN phase were identified. The resulting structure changes led to both decreases in the hardness and wear resistance of Cr–B–N coatings.