The effect of carbon doping on microstructure, mechanical properties, wear resistance and cutting performance of AlTiCN coating
Introduction
As one of the most studied hard coating systems to date, AlTiN has attracted the attention of many researchers. AlTiN coating is superior to traditional TiN in hardness and wear resistance, and the addition of Al also greatly improves the high temperature resistance of the coating [1], [2], [3], [4]. AlTiN coating prepared by physical vapor deposition (PVD) has been widely used in various industrial fields, especially as protective material, such as cutting tools and friction parts [5], [6], [7]. Cathodic arc evaporation is one of the most commonly used techniques for preparing nitride coating. The coating prepared by cathodic arc evaporation usually has a relatively dense structure and good thermal stability. However, since the surface diffusion capacity of deposited particles is high, droplet defects are often formed on the coating surface, which improves the surface roughness of the coating [8].
At present, with the continuous development of technologies in the field of processing, the requirements for coating performance are gradually becoming higher, and the traditional AlTiN coating has been difficult to meet the needs of most industries [9], [10], [11], [12]. Therefore, how to prepare nitride coatings with better properties has gradually become a trend of current research. The properties of AlTiN coatings have been improved by element doping and residual stress controlling in recent years [13], [14]. Many researchers have carried out research on alloying modified nitride coatings. Aninat et al. [15] reported how the addition of Y, Ta or Y and Ta affects the structural and mechanical properties of Ti-Al-N, which were deposited by industrial cathodic arc evaporation system. Danek et al. [16] prepared TiAlN/CrAlN coatings with different Cr concentrations by DC reactive magnetron sputtering to investigate the effects of Cr on structure, mechanical properties and oxidation properties at 800 and 900°C.
Among them, carbon atoms can exist in coatings in various forms (such as crystal compounds or a-carbon), and different coating structures exhibit different properties with the change of carbon content [17,18]. Many researches have shown that when carbon content is in a low range (<7 at.%), the addition of carbon can increase the hardness of AlTiN coating, but as the content continues to increase, the hardness of coating decreases instead [19], [20], [21]. However, there is still a lack of systematic research on the relationship between microstructure and properties of coatings with low carbon content. In addition, many researchers doped C mainly through the reaction atmosphere (such as methane, acetylene and other gases), which brought safety risks to production. It's a good choice to use binary or even ternary alloy targets to prepare coatings with different elements. Yin et al. [22] prepared AlTiSiN and AlTiBN coatings by cathode arc evaporation using ternary AlTiSi and AlTiB alloy targets. The prepared AlTiSiN and AlTiBN coatings have higher hardness and lower wear rate than AlTiN.
Therefore, based on the above two points, this paper proposes to prepare carbon-doping AlTiN coatings by adding 2 at.% carbon to the target source by using cathodic evaporation deposition. The content of carbon in the coatings was adjusted by controlling the proportion of two different targets (Ti-Al/Ti-Al-0.2C) in the deposition process, and the microstructure and related properties of the coating are studied to find the best carbon doping amount.
Section snippets
Coating deposition
Five different coatings were deposited on Balzers Oerlikon Rapid Coating System (RCS) by cathode arc evaporation deposition with two powder metallurgy targets. The composition (at.%) of the two targets is: Al0.67Ti0.33 and Al0.65Ti0.33C0.02. The substrate was metallurgical produced WC + 10 wt.% Co cemented carbide, which was polished (Ra < 0.1 μm) and ultrasonically cleaned with acetone solution before deposition. The schematic diagram of the deposition chamber for cathode arc evaporation is
Chemical composition
In order to determine the chemical composition of the deposited coating more accurately, five different coatings were characterized by EPMA with an analytical accuracy of 1–2%. The chemical composition and constitution of the deposited AlTiCN coatings is shown in Table 2. The results show that in the five different coatings, the N content is close to the theoretical value. In the case of the carbon-free coating, the [Al]/([Al] + [Ti]) ratio is lower than that in the targets. This case may
Conclusions
In this work, the C-doped AlTiN coatings were deposited on the cemented carbide by arc-evaporation technique to illustrate the effect of carbon addition on the structure, mechanical properties, wear resistance and cutting performance of AlTiCN coatings. Since the C content in the coating is very small, C only acts as a growth inhibitor. With the increase of C content, the structure of the coating is changed from NaCl type crystalline structure to crystalline + amorphous composite structure, and
Credit author statement
Yu Chen designed the experiments, collected and assessed the experimental data, wrote the first draft of the manuscript and provided major revisions. Tao Peng was responsible for the writing -review & editing. Huadong Zhang & Fangsheng Mei carried out all device fabrication and characterization. Tiechui Yuan & Jiangxiong Gao was mainly responsible for proposing conceptual ideas and supervising experiments. Ruidi Li & Xiaoliang Lin provided the support of software analysis and rectifying the
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 51874369 & 51871249). The authors are also thankful for the support provided by Zhuzhou Huarui Precision Cutting Tools Co., Ltd.
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