Industrial-scale deposition of highly adherent CNx films on steel substrates

Abstract

Highly adherent carbon nitride (CN x ) films were deposited using a novel pretreatment with two high power impulse magnetron sputtering (HIPIMS) power supplies in a master-slave configuration: one to establish the discharge and one to produce a pulsed substrate bias. During the pretreatment, SKF3 (AISI 52100) steel substrates were pulse-biased in the environment of a HIPIMS Cr plasma in order to sputter clean the surface and to implant Cr metal ions. Subsequently, CN x films were prepared at room temperature by DC unbalanced magnetron sputtering from a high purity graphite target in a N 2 /Ar discharge at 3 mTorr. All processing was done in an industrial CemeCon CC800 system. A series of

Tribocorrosion behavior and ions release of CoCrMo alloy coated with a TiAlVCN/CN multilayer in simulated body fluid plus bovine serum albumin

“…steel) [15]. But Broitman et al reported that CNx films deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering on metallic biomaterials exhibit good tribological properties and improved adhesion on metallic substrates [16][17][18]. Moreover the low coefficient of friction (COF) of CNx films has the potential to cause lower wear against polymeric materials such as ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) in human serum conditions [19].…”

Manufacturing and Characterization of a Carbon-Based Amorphous (a-CNX) Coating Material

“…Thick a-CN X film deposition on steel substrate by magnetron sputtering process is limited due to poor adhesion between the film and substrate as well as because of high compressive stress which can be built up inside the film during the deposition process [27]. Wang et al [28] reported that after a certain critical bias voltage (-150 V), the adhesion between the film and substrate decreases with increasing bias voltage.…”

“…Another practice is to apply some kind of additive layer by means of sputtering the metal target material between the film and substrate as a bonding agent. Broitman et al [27] demonstrated that the high energy chromium (Cr) plasma etching in HiPIMS can substantially clean the oxide and other contaminants from the steel substrate surface and thus can enhance the adhesion. They also showed that a thin sublayer of Cr (100 nm) as well as amorphous transition layer deposited by HiPIMS in master-slave configuration can further increase the adhesion.…”

Novel method for in-situ and simultaneous nanofriction and nanowear characterization of materials

“…These amorphous films are a mix of sp 3 tetrahedral bonding (like in single-crystal diamonds) and sp 2 trigonal bonding (like in single-crystal graphite), and usually deposited by physical or chemical vapor deposition techniques 14 . Since Bhushan published the first nanotribological study of amorphous carbon films using an atomic force microscope (AFM) 15 , there have been many studies about the nanotribological properties of carbon-based coatings, as it has been reviewed for dry and lubricated conditions [16][17][18][19][20][21][22] . We can observe that for dry tests (Figure 8a), the friction coefficient decreases with the increase of the applied load from 10 µN to 100 µN, and stays constant when increasing from 100 µN to 1000 µN.…”