Stress relief behaviour of diamond-like carbon films on glasses

Abstract

The stress relief behaviour of diamond-like carbon (DLC) films on glass substrates was investigated. The r.f.-plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition method was used for the deposition with variable negative bias voltages of the cathode from -100 to -700 V. Beyond a critical thickness of the film, film delamination starts to occur after its removal from the reaction chamber. In addition to the previously observed stress relief morphologies, sinusoidal cracking and sinusoidal removal of the film are also observed. The stress relief morphology is dependent on the film thickness and the negative bias voltage. The measured wavelength of sinusoidal buckling increases with both increasing film thickness and increasing negative bias voltage. This behaviour is qualitatively consistent with a phenomenological equation derived by Nir. It was suggested that the elastic modulus of the DLC film can be calculated using the dependence of the wavelength of sinusoidal buckling on the film thickness and the negative bias voltage.

Growth mechanism of amorphous carbon by liquid plasma electrolytic deposition

“…As the applied voltage arises, the carbon grains gradually agglomerate from tens of nanometers to hundreds, more interspace appears, and the severity of cracking gradually increases. It has been acknowledged that enough stress was necessarily generated during vapor deposition; this makes diamond‐like carbon film break into rectangular pieces . The increasing voltage results in the sufficiently high electric field between the electrodes, causing the occurrence of plasma discharge.…”

Effects of interface sliding on the formation of telephone cord buckles

“…This analysis provides a method using the blister morphology to measure the interface adhesion [3][4][5]. However, one of the most commonly observed blisters exhibits a so called telephone cord morphology [6][7][8][9][10][11], which is still a challenge to model. Approximately modeling the telephone cord buckle as a straight-sided or a pinned circular blister was adopted in the technique of interface adhesion measurements [12][13][14][15].…”

Magnetron Sputtered Pulsed Laser Deposition Scale Up

“…This is due to the inherent increase in the film stress vector sum, which results in inevitable film delamination 26 , 27 , 28 . Even when an appropriate sample preparation technique is used, delamination from the substrate occurs, due to residual stresses, hardness, and modulus differences of DLC and substrates of comparatively softer materials such as metals or steel alloys.…”