Abstract
Physical vapor deposition (PVD) is a well-known route for manufacturing hard coatings. In recent years, PVD has also been applied to create high-entropy alloy (HEA) thin films. HEAs are multicomponent alloys with nearly equal atomic fractions. To achieve the desired composition, typically alloy targets are used in the deposition process. The present work demonstrates that HEA thin films can also be processed using a multiple beam sputtering system in PVD, which does not require preliminary manufacturing of HEA targets, but rather uses commercially pure metal targets. The effectivity of this technique was demonstrated on a nanocrystalline CoCrNiFe HEA film with a thickness of about 1 μm. A part of the compositional gradient sample exhibited equal elemental fractions. The microstructure and the hardness of this part of the PVD film were studied in detail, and the results were compared with those obtained on a bulk nanocrystalline sample having the same chemical composition, but was prepared by the high pressure torsion (HPT) technique. The crystallite size and the texture were characterized by X-ray diffraction, while the hardness was measured by nanoindentation. The PVD film exhibited an exceptionally high hardness of 9.8 ± 0.3 GPa, a value that was notably higher than that determined for the HPT sample (7.3 ± 0.3 GPa). This study also demonstrated the capability of this new multiple beam sputtering technique for the production of compositional gradient samples with a wide range of elemental concentrations, enabling combinatorial analysis of multiple elements high-entropy alloy.
Highlights
High Entropy Alloys (HEAs) exemplify a recent development in materials science [1,2]
Severe plastic deformation (SPD) through high pressure torsion (HPT) technique was applied on different HEA materials in order to obtain nanocrystalline microstructures [7,8,9,10]
Physical sputtering is a non-thermal vaporization process where the surface atoms are physically ejected from a solid surface by momentum transfer from atomic-sized energetic bombarding particles, which are usually gaseous ions accelerated from a plasma [14]
Summary
High Entropy Alloys (HEAs) exemplify a recent development in materials science [1,2]. The synthesis of HEA materials exploits many different methods such as melt spinning [2], electromagnetic stirring [4], vacuum arc melting [5], or mechanical alloying [6]. PVD is a well-known method to produce thin films and coatings. During this process, atoms or molecules are deposited onto a surface from a solid or liquid source in a vacuum. The main categories of PVD are ion plating, vapor deposition, arc deposition, vacuum deposition, and sputtering deposition. In the latter method, the deposited particles are vaporized from a surface (“target”) by a physical sputtering process. Numerous PVD methods have been developed, such as inductively coupled plasma magnetron sputtering (ICP-MS), high power impulse magnetron sputtering (HIPIMS), self-sustained sputtering
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