Enhanced mechanical and tribological properties of V-Al-C coatings via increasing columnar boundaries

Abstract Grain size, growth morphology, and grain boundary were considered to affect hardness and fracture toughness of hard coatings. An effective approach is currently developed to improve their hardness and toughness via tailoring their architectures through grain boundary control. V-Al-C coatings consisting of variable architectures were prepared by reactive sputtering V 2 AlC target with different CH 4 flow rates in this study. The results indicated that, when the carbon content increased from 37.32 at.% to 71.4 at.%, the microstructure of V-Al-C coatings was tailored to span a wide changes from coarse columnar grain to fibrous columnar grains and finally to nanocomposite structure consisted of the (V, Al)C nanocrystallites and sp 2 -rich a-C. Especially, the maximum hardness of 28.74 GPa and the excellent toughness with high H/E value of 0.11 were obtained once the coating displayed fibrous columnar structure, such good mechanical properties benefited the lowest wear rate of 2.8 × 10 −16  m 3 /Nm. Instead, the nanocomposite structure showed the lower fracture resistance due to the dominated amorphous carbon matrix. All coatings with nanocomposite structure exhibited low friction coefficient of ∼0.18, which was attributed to the coupling lubrication originated from both V 2 O 5 Magneli phases and amorphous carbon formed during friction process. The enhanced mechanical and tribological properties were also discussed in terms of the columnar boundaries evolution as a function of carbon content.