Preparation of Elastic DLC Film on Rubber by T-shape Filtered Arc Deposition

Abstract

T-shape filtered arc deposition (T-FAD) is specially designed for removing melted and un-melted macrodroplets from cathodic arc plasma and shows a superior ability to prepare droplet-free thin solid films.Furthermore, T-FAD has a feature that the film formation is done mostly by ions, since the plasma transported magnetically in T-FAD system is ionized nearly 100%.In the present study, by using T-FAD system with graphite cathode, carbon film was deposited on various rubbers. The film was verified as diamond-like carbon (DLC) by Raman spectroscopy. The DLC film was adhered well to the rubber and was not peeled off when the rubber was bended and stretched. The surface morphology, coefficient of friction, and adherence of the prepared DLC film were investigated. The surface of DLC film on rubber was not flat and has random texture structure. The coefficient of friction was lower than 0.2 in most cases. In pulling-off test (JIS K 6256) for adherence evaluation, some rubbers were broken without exfoliation of the DLC film, and the DLC films on other rubbers were peeled off at 1.3-kN/m load.

Magnetron reactively sputtered Ti-DLC coatings on HNBR rubber: The influence of substrate bias

“…However, no quantitative evaluation of the adhesion and tribological performance was published. In their early work published in Japanese [12,13], hydrogen-free DLC-coated rubbers reached a CoF of 0.16-0.39 and hydrogenated DLC coated rubbers with a CoF of 0.15-0.23, in reciprocating tribotests against ø10 mm SUS304 steel ball under 2 N normal load. Recently, we have deposited W-DLC coatings via reactive sputtering on FKM, HNBR and ACM (acrylate) rubbers [14,15].…”

The Potential of Tribological Application of DLC/MoS2 Coated Sealing Materials

“…An approach to reduce the friction under dry and starved lubrication conditions is to deposit DLC on rubber. A lot of studies, from deposition techniques to DLC composition on various rubber materials, such as nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR), hydrogenated nitrile butadiene rubber (HNBR), fluoroelastomer (FKM), and ethylene propylene diene monomer rubber (EPDM), has been done by a Japanese group of Nakahigashi [3,4], Takikawa et al [5][6][7], a Dutch group of Pei and Bui et al [8][9][10][11][12], and other researchers [13,14]. MoS 2 as a solid lubricant is mostly employed with hard surfaces (e.g., metals, ceramics) [15][16][17].…”

Development of X-Shape Filtered Arc Deposition (X-FAD) Apparatus and DLC/Cr Film Preparation

“…However, the cathode emits not only plasma particles (electrons, ions, neutrals) but also macro particles (so-called droplets) of cathode material. The authors have been developing the FAD with a T-shape filter duct (T-FAD) system with efficient droplet reduction [5,6]. However, it is difficult to deposit thick ta-C film on superhard alloy substrate with this apparatus.…”