The effect of the substrate bias voltage on the mechanical and corrosion properties of chromium carbide thin films by filtered cathodic vacuum arc deposition

Reactive High-Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering of Chromium-Carbon Films

“…The nanoindentation results of the Cr-C film deposited with different substrate bias voltages shown in Figure 6 indirectly proves the densified film structure. The hardness of films increases by enhancing the negative substrate bias, which is similar to the results of vacuum arc deposited and the HiPIMS-deposited Cr-C films [6,12].…”

“…The intensity around 40 • is relatively stronger in films deposited with negative biases. A similar phenomenon was also found in Cr-C films prepared by using vacuum arc [6,22], sputtering [12,23], and HiPIMS [12,18] depositions in an Ar/carbon hydride atmosphere. This suggests the formation of some nanocrystalline CrC with applying negative substrate bias due to the kinetic energy enhancement of incident ions [27][28][29].…”

“…The combination of chromium and carbon can synthesize various compounds, including metallic alloy, chromium carbides of different stoichiometric compositions, and carbon-based materials, which show different hardness, toughness, chemical stability, electrical conductivity, and tribological properties [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Metal-carbon thin films are easily synthesized via plasma-enhanced physical vapor depositions, such as cathodic arc ion plating [5,6,9], magnetron sputtering [10][11][12][13][14][15], electron-beam deposition [16,17], high-power impulse magnetron sputtering [12,[18][19][20], and a hybrid method [21]. The hardness of chromium carbide is varied up to ten times depending on the deposition processes [13][14][15].…”

“…The fractions of sp3/sp2 bonding ratio and nanocrystalline carbide phases influence the hardness, elastic modulus, and thermal stability of coatings [15,24]. The ratio of a-C:H and carbide phases is usually dominated by the mixture ratio of hydrocarbon and inert gas during the deposition [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], and the sp3/sp2 bonding ratio of a-C:H phases and grain size of carbides are strongly affected by the substrate bias voltage and the pulse width [6,14,18,19].…”

Assessment of the mechanical and tribological performance of a ZrN PVD coating

“…It has been shown that CrN, ZrN, and TiAlCrN produced by closed field unbalanced magnetron sputter ion plating (CFUBMSIP) could substitute the hard chromium coating, considering its excellent anti-adhesion properties (Sun et al, 2006). However, additional important issues that arise between the epoxy molding compound and the encapsulation molds are those related to the mold releasing problems and the tribological performance of these coatings (Lina et al, 2006).…”