Tribological properties of ta-CNx coatings with different nitrogen content under oil lubrication conditions

Synthesis of Carbon Nitride Films by Unbalanced Magnetron Sputtering Method and The Sliding Characteristics under Oil Lubrication

“…As elements constituting a novel hard material, a combination of three elements: boron, carbon, and nitrogen is advocated by Taki, Takai, et al in 1996 [4], and it is advocated by Liu, Cohen, et al in 1989 that among these, carbon nitride by combining C and N shows a higher elastic modulus than diamond [5,6], which has not yet been realized. However, many researchers synthesized carbon nitride films by various methods and the characteristics, therefore are gradually becoming clear, and utilization thereof as a novel hard film exhibiting with low friction characteristics [7,8] and because of having excellent electronic characteristics, optical characteristics, chemical stability, etc., utilization thereof for electrodes [9,10] and so on are expected. As described above, a carbon nitride film is considered a suitable material for a surface treatment film for a sliding component as a film having a high hardness and low friction characteristics in the same manner as a DLC film.…”

“…Therefore, a material exhibiting low friction characteristics in a lubricant environment is of great interest. For that reason, the carbon nitride film can be highly expected to be applied as a surface treatment film for machine components or sliding components to be used under lubricant environment [7,8,11,12]. As for the synthesis method for carbon nitride films, the synthesis can be performed by a vapor-phase method such as physical vapor deposition (PVD) or chemical vapor deposition (CVD), and many studies have been conducted [13][14][15][16][17], however, there are few studies on deposition by unbalanced magnetron sputtering (UBM) and the sliding characteristics under lubricant environment of film thereof [13,17].…”