Abstract
Due to an attractive combination of chemical and physical properties, silicon carbide (SiC) thin films are excellent candidates for coatings to be used in harsh environment applications or as protective coatings in heat exchanger applications. This work reports the deposition of near-stoichiometric and nanocrystalline SiC thin films, at room temperature, on silicon (100) substrates using a DCMS/HiPIMS co-sputtering technique (DCMS—direct current magnetron sputtering; HiPIMS—high-power impulse magnetron sputtering). Their structural and mechanical properties were analyzed as a function of the process gas pressure. The correlation between the films’ microstructure and their mechanical properties was thoroughly investigated. The microstructure and morphology of these films were examined by appropriate microscopic and spectroscopic methods: atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and Raman spectroscopy, while their mechanical and tribological properties were evaluated by instrumented indentation and micro-scratch techniques. The lowest value of the working gas pressure resulted in SiC films of high crystallinity, as well as in an improvement in their mechanical performances. Both hardness (H) and Young’s modulus (E) values were observed to be significantly influenced by the sputtering gas pressure. Decreasing the gas pressure from 2.0 to 0.5 Pa led to an increase in H and E values from 8.2 to 20.7 GPa and from 106.3 to 240.0 GPa, respectively. Both the H/E ratio and critical adhesion load values follow the same trend and increase from 0.077 to 0.086 and from 1.55 to 3.85 N, respectively.
Highlights
Silicon carbide (SiC) is a semiconductor composed of light elements
Due to its attractive properties, including its low coefficient of thermal expansion, low neutron absorption cross-section, high thermal conductivity, high hardness, and superior tribological, chemical and oxidation resistance, it is well suited as a protective coating in heat exchanger applications [1] or as a sensing material in harsh environments [2,3]
Prior to the deposition process, the chamber of the sputtering system was evacuated to a base pressure lower than 10−4 Pa using a system consisting of a turbo-molecular pump and a dry scroll pump
Summary
Due to its attractive properties, including its low coefficient of thermal expansion, low neutron absorption cross-section, high thermal conductivity, high hardness, and superior tribological, chemical and oxidation resistance, it is well suited as a protective coating in heat exchanger applications [1] or as a sensing material in harsh environments [2,3]. Due to their chemical inertness, SiC-based thin films have great potential as protective layers for Si-based 4.0/). Compared to the most often used deposition techniques (i.e., pulsed laser deposition and chemical vapor deposition), magnetron sputtering has several important advantages, such as its costeffectiveness, simplicity, high deposition rate, low deposition temperature, good adhesion of films to the substrate, excellent uniformity on large-area substrates and the ability to control films’ stoichiometry [10,11]
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