Abstract
Despite intense research on high entropy films, the mechanism of film growth and the influence of key factors remain incompletely understood. In this study, high entropy films consisting of five elements (FeCoNiCrAl) with columnar and nanometer-scale grains were prepared by magnetron sputtering. The high entropy film growth mechanism, including the formation of the amorphous domain, equiaxial nanocrystalline structure and columnar crystal was clarified by analyzing the microstructure in detail. Besides, the impacts of the important deposition parameters including the substrate temperature, the powder loaded in the target, and the crystal orientation of the substrate on the grain size and morphology, phase structure, crystallinity and elemental uniformity were revealed. The mechanical properties of high entropy films with various microstructure features were investigated by nanoindentation. With the optimized grain size and microstructure, the film deposited at 350 °C using a power of 100 W exhibits the highest hardness of 11.09 GPa. Our findings not only help understanding the mechanisms during the high entropy film deposition, but also provide guidance in manufacturing other novel high entropy films.
Highlights
High entropy alloy (HEA) is an emerging class of compositionally complex alloys containing five to thirteen principal metallic elements with a near-equiatomic radio [1,2]
The results suggest that the structure of High entropy film (HEF) is almost unaffected by the crystal orientation of substrate
The sputtered atoms with interact with the substrate and becomeand adatoms, and the the sputtered atoms interact the substrate atoms andatoms become adatoms, the amorphous domain comes to exist on the substrate by the migration and aggregation of adatoms
Summary
High entropy alloy (HEA) is an emerging class of compositionally complex alloys containing five to thirteen principal metallic elements with a near-equiatomic radio [1,2]. Since HEAs were first reported by Cantor et al [3], they have attracted great attention in materials science. Many previous researches have revealed that HEAs have great potential to be used as high temperature materials and structural materials under extreme conditions requiring high hardness, excellent strength and ductility [4,5,6,7]. The large lattice distortion and high configurational mixing entropy of the HEAs offer possibilities for catalytic applications [8,9,10], corrosion resistant material [11] and nuclear applications [12]. HEAs have three forms: bulk, film and powder. HEA powder is usually applied as catalyst and abradant
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