Substrate Effects on the Micro/Nanomechanical Properties of TiN Coatings

Abstract

Nanoindentation and nanoscratch tests were performed for titanium nitride (TiN) coatings on different tool steel substrates to investigate the indentation/scratch induced deformation behavior of the coatings and the adhesion of the coating-substrate interfaces and their tribological property. In this work, TiN coatings with a thickness of about 500 nm were grown on GT35, 9Cr18 and 40CrNiMo steels using vacuum magnetic-filtering arc plasma deposition. In the nanoindentation tests, the hardness and modulus curves for TiN/GT35 reduced the slowest around the film thickness 500 nm with the increase of indentation depth, followed by TiN/9Cr18 and TiN/40CrNiMo. Improving adhesion properties of coating and substrate can decrease the differences of internal stress field. The scratch tests showed that the scratch response was controlled by plastic deformation in the substrate. The substrate plays an important role in determining the mechanical properties and wear resistance of such coatings. TiN/GT35 exhibited the best load-carrying capacity and scratch/wear resistance. As a consequence, GT35 is the best substrate for TiN coatings of the substrate materials tested.

Microstructure and nanomechanical properties of the wing membrane of dragonfly

“…From the results above, the relative errors of both the mean Young's modulus and the mean hardness for the living and the dead wings are computed to be less than 4%. However, under the tested conditions that we measured the mechanical properties of the membranes, the testing processes might induce a testing error to be about 5% [15,16]. Therefore, if we consider the testing deviations derived from the testing system itself, such as the instability of the indenter, we can approximately deem that there are not differences between the material properties of the wing membranes of the living and the dead dragonflies.…”

Deposition and Nanotribological Characterization of Sub-100-nm Thick Protective Ti-Based Coatings for Miniature Applications

“…The H/E r values for the coatings were found to be in the 0.05-0.06 range for all the coatings studied. The moderate value of H/E r resilience to elastic/plastic deformation of the substrate during contact making the coating system good candidate for applications where both wear resistance and coating resilience is required [23]. [24,25], which was 0.07.…”

Experimental study on the microstructure and nanomechanical properties of the wing membrane of dragonfly

“…where C n are constants that depend on the indenter geometry and are given by calibrating initially a standard sample with known material properties [15,16]. In the present study, C 0 = 21.4, C 1 = 2100, and take the rests to be zero.…”

“…For the diamond indenter used in our experiments, E i = 1141 GPa and ν i = 0.07. Also, in the present calculation, Poisson's ratio of the specimen is taken as 0.4 for macromolecular materials [14][15][16]. The hardness of the material is defined by:…”