Study of the structural changes induced by air oxidation in Ti–Si–N hard coatings.
International audience; 3-μm thick Ti–Si–N coatings were deposited on polished X38CrMoV5 substrates by sputtering a composite Ti–Si target in Ar–N2 reactive mixture. Oxidation tests were performed in air at 700 °C during 2 h. Whatever the silicon content in the range 0–4 at.%, no silicon containing compound was detected by XRD before air oxidation and only the TiN phase was evidenced. The mean grain size estimated from the full width at half maximum of the TiN (111) diffraction peak was close to 10 nm. As commonly reported for Ti–Si–N films, the hardness showed a maximum at 51 GPa versus the Si content. After oxidation of the TiN film, XRD and micro-Raman analyses revealed the occurrence of…
Effect of germanium addition on the properties of reactively sputtered ZrN films
For the first time, Zr-Ge-N films were deposited on silicon and steel substrates by sputtering a Zr-Ge composite target in reactive Ar-N2 mixture. The films were characterised by electron probe microanalysis, X-ray diffraction, micro-Raman spectroscopy and depth-sensing indentation. The effects of the Ge content and substrate bias voltage on the films' structure, internal stress, hardness and oxidation resistance were investigated. Substrate bias strongly influenced the chemical composition of the films being observed by means of a steep decrease in the Ge content for negative bias voltages higher than -80 V. In these cases, a significant hardness improvement was registered. For -100 V bias…