Effect of residual stress on the wear behavior of magnetron sputtered V–Al–N coatings deposited at the substrate temperature

Abstract

Residual stress is believed to greatly influence wear behavior of physical vapor deposition coatings, especially for those deposited at low substrate temperatures. Here, comparison and evaluation were performed on friction-wear behavior of the V–Al–N coatings that were deposited with the <200 °C substrate temperature. The hardness and the compressive stress of coatings varied from 14.1 GPa to 35.5 GPa and 0.06 GPa–3.83 GPa, when the substrate bias increased from 0 to −20 V. Low wear rates (∼10−16 m3/N m) were achieved in the V0.43Al0.57N coatings with medium compressive stress (∼3 GPa). By contrast, the specific wear rate increased by two orders of magnitude (∼2.8 × 10−14 m3/N m) when the compressive stress increased to −3.83 ± 0.24 GPa. Therefore, it could be concluded that the highly strained coatings were generally subjected to fractured-dominated wear, which should be avoided in developing low-wear transition nitride hard coatings.