Effect of cathodic arc PVD parameters on roughness of TiN coating on steel substrate

doi:10.1016/j.cap.2009.07.007

Current Applied Physics

Volume 10, Issue 2, March 2010, Pages 471-474

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cap.2009.07.007 Get rights and content

Abstract

Titanium nitride which is widely used as a hard coating material was coated on tool steel, by physical vapor deposition method. Surface roughness was investigated as a function of deposition rate, substrate bias and temperature, nitrogen flow rate and metal ion etching. The study showed that increase in surface roughness mainly depends on the condition of sample preparation, surface treatment, macro-droplets, pitting defects, rise in compressive stress at higher coating thickness, growth defects and to a lesser extent selection of surface under testing. It was observed that chromium ion etching significantly reduced the surface roughness compared to titanium ion etching.

Introduction

Titanium nitride (TiN) thin films deposited by PVD technology have a wide range of commercial application such as cutting tools and artificial jewelry. In all such applications the smoothness of the finished surface is of prime importance. In this context, the terms surface finish and surface roughness are used very widely in industry and are generally used to quantify the smoothness of a surface finish.

Surface finish could be specified through different parameters. According to Lou et al. [1], roughness average (Ra) and root-mean-square (rms) roughness (Rq) are the most widely used surface parameters in industry. More recently, however other parameters like surface roughness of the maximum profile height (Rp) and surface roughness of the maximum profile valley depth (Rv) etc., have also been used. In this study the first three parameters (Ra, Rp, Rq) have been used to characterize TiN based hard coatings.

Section snippets

Experimental procedure

The objective of the present work is to study the influence of processing parameters on the surface roughness of TiN coatings deposited on D2 tool steel by using cathodic arc physical vapor deposition (CAPVD) technique. In this work, Titanium nitride (TiN) single layer coatings have been deposited in a commercially available HTC 625/2 ARC coating system, detailed description of which is given elsewhere [2]. The deposition parameters studied are given in Table 1, Table 2. A partial pressure of N₂

Results and discussion

The variation in the surface roughness for both uncoated and coated samples was studied. In all cases, the average surface roughness was measured at five different locations and results were averaged. The baseline roughness of the D2 steel substrate exists mainly because of the migration of tiny particles of SiC emery paper into the sample during metallography process. Again, these tiny particles of SiC increase the surface roughness of TiN-coated samples. Uniformity in surface roughness within

Conclusions

From the present work, it can be concluded that surface roughness mainly depends on nature of substrate and its surface, deposition time, coating thickness, substrate temperature and bias voltage, whether metal ion etching has been performed or not. The surface roughness increase, resulting from deposition of the TiN coatings should be attributed to the cathodic arc PVD process character and occurrence of the characteristic macro-droplets. Again, the variation in surface roughness is due to

Acknowledgements

One of the authors, Mubarak Ali, would like to thank the Government of Malaysia, for the award of a scholarship for PhD studies and AMREC, SIRIM Berhad for the access to the experimental facilities for this research.

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Effect of cathodic arc PVD parameters on roughness of TiN coating on steel substrate

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Experimental procedure

Results and discussion

Conclusions

Acknowledgements

Thin Solid Films

Surf. Coat. Technol.

Surf. Coat. Technol.

J. Mater. Process. Technol.

Vacuum