Effects of TiN sublayers on the response of TiSiN nanocomposite coatings to nanoidentation and scratching contacts》.pdf

Materials Science and Engineering A 527 (2010) 4447–4457 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Materials Science and Engineering A j o u rn al h omepage: w w w. elsev /locate/msea Effects of TiN sublayers on the response of TiSiN nanocomposite coatings to nanoidentation and scratching contacts P.C. Wo a,∗ , P.R. Munroe a , Z.F. Zhou b , K.Y. Li b , Z.H. Xie c a Electron Microscope Unit, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia b Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, PR China c School of Engineering, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA 6027, Australia a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: The effects of introducing thin-TiN sublayers into TiSiN nanocomposite coatings on the deformation Received 20 February 2010 mechanisms imparted by both uni-axial indentation and scratch contacts were evaluated by examining Received in revised form 22 March 2010 cross-sections of the deformed samples. Nanoindentation testing shows that the monolithic TiSiN coating Accepted 26 March 2010 is much harder than the monolithic TiN. The indentation hardness of the multilayer samples increased with the thickness of the TiSiN sublayer in the TiSiN/TiN multilayer coatings. The density of catastrophic cracks in the coatings was largely reduced when relatively ductile TiN sublayers were introduced to Keywords: