Abstract
Tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C) has emerged as an excellent coating material for improving the reliability of application components under high normal loads. Herein, we present the results of our investigations regarding the mechanical and tribological properties of a 2-µm-thick multilayer ta-C coating on high-speed steel substrates. Multilayers composed of alternating soft and hard layers are fabricated using filtered a cathodic vacuum arc with alternating substrate bias voltages (0 and 100 V or 0 and 150 V). The thickness ratio is discovered to be 1:3 for the sp2-rich and sp3-rich layers. The results show that the hardness and elastic modulus of the multilayer ta-C coatings increase with the sp3 content of the hard layer. The hardness reached approximately 37 GPa, whereas an improved toughness and a higher adhesion strength (> 29 N) are obtained. The friction performance (µ = 0.07) of the multilayer coating is similar to that of the single layer ta-C thick coating, but the wear rate (0.13 × 10−6 mm3/(N·m)) improved under a high load of 30 N. We further demonstrate the importance of the multilayer structure in suppressing crack propagation and increasing the resistance to plastic deformation (H3/E2) ratio.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Program of the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS/PNK7000) and the Fundamental R&D Program of the Ministry of Science, Information & Communication Technology (ICT), and Future Planning in Republic of Korea.
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Young-Jun JANG. He received his Ph.D. degree from mechanical science and engineering, Nagoya University, Japan, in 2010. He is currently a principal researcher in the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS) in Republic of Korea. He has interests in both fundamental and applied aspects of manufacturing and tribology, especially in DLC coating.
Jae-Il KIM. He received his M.S. degree from Department of Mechanical Engineering, Pusan National University, in 2020. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Micro-nano Mechanical Science and Engineering, Nagoya University. His research interests include hard coating tribology, especially in tribology on carbon-based coating.
WooYoung LEE. He received his Ph.D. degree from mechanical science and engineering, Nagoya University, Japan, in 2019. He is currently a designated assistant professor at Nagoya University. He has interests in fundamental coating including DLC, VC, CrN coating, and coating tribology based on DLC coating.
Jongkuk KIM. He received his Ph.D. degree from nuclear engineering, Seoul National University, in 2000. He is currently a principal researcher in the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS). His research interests include both plasma and filtered cathodic vacuum arc source (FCVA) development, ion beam source research, and ta-C coating.
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Jang, YJ., Kim, JI., Lee, W. et al. Tribological properties of multilayer tetrahedral amorphous carbon coatings deposited by filtered cathodic vacuum arc deposition. Friction 9, 1292–1302 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40544-020-0476-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40544-020-0476-y