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Abstract. The mechanical and tribological behavior of physical vapor deposited coatings on soft substrate materials gains increasing interest due to economical and environmental aspects -e.g. substitution of steels by light-weight metals or polymers in transport vehicles. Nevertheless, such soft materials require surface protection against wear in tribological contacts. Single layer hard coatings deposited at room temperature are brittle with a relatively poor adhesion. Therefore, they should be better substituted by tough multilayer coatings of soft-hard material combinations. However, the mechanics of such multilayer coatings with several 10 nm thick bilayer periods is difficult and yet not well described. The presented work tries to fill the gap of knowledge by focusing both on mechanical investigations of hardness, adhesion, and wear and on microscopic elucidation of deformation mechanisms. In the paper 1 µm thick Ti/TiN multilayer stacks were deposited by magnetron sputtering on soft austenitic steel substrates at room temperature to prevent distortion of functional components in future applications. High hardness was found for 8 and 16 bilayer films with modulation ratio Ti:TiN = 1:2 and 1:4. This was attributed (with use of transmission electron microscopy) to stopping the crack propagation in thin Ti layers of the multilayer systems by shear deformation combined with different fracture mechanisms in comparison with that for the TiN single layers (edge cracks at the border of the contact area and ring cracks outside, respectively).

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