Deposition, characterization, and tribological applications of near-frictionless carbon filmson glass and ceramic substrates

Abstract

As an element, carbon is rather unique and offers a range of rare opportunities for the designand fabrication of zero-, one-, two-, and three-dimensional nanostructured novel materialsand coatings such as fullerenes, nanotubes, thin films, and free-standing nano-to-macroscalestructures. Among these, carbon-based two-dimensional thin films (such as diamond anddiamond-like carbon (DLC)) have attracted an overwhelming interest in recent years,mainly because of their exceptional physical, chemical, mechanical, electrical, andtribological properties. In particular, certain DLC films were found to provide extremelylow friction and wear coefficients to sliding metallic and ceramic surfaces. Since the early1990s, carbon has been used at Argonne National Laboratory to synthesize a class of novelDLC films that now provide friction and wear coefficients as low as 0.001 and10−11–10−10 mm3 N−1 m−1, respectively, when tested in inert or vacuum test environments. Over the years, wehave optimized these films and applied them successfully to all kinds of metallicand ceramic substrates and evaluated their friction and wear properties under awide range of sliding conditions. In this paper, we will provide details of ourrecent work on the deposition, characterization, and tribological applicationsof near-frictionless carbon films on glass and ceramic substrates. We will alsoprovide chemical and structural information about these films and describe thefundamental tribological mechanisms that control their unusual friction and wearbehaviour.