Wear behaviors of TiN/TiCN/DLC composite coatings in different environments

Diamond like carbon (DLC) coatings have high wear resistance and low coefficient of friction and its features are being tried to be further developed. We deposited TiN/TiCN/DLC composite coatings on inconel substrates with closed field unbalanced magnetron sputtering system to improve the features of the conventional DLC coatings. Structural, chemical and bond types of the coating were obtained with the XRD, SEM, EDS and XPS analyses. Wear behaviors of the coatings were determined in atmosphere, distillated water and commercial oil conditions under low (2 N) and high (10 N) constant load values with using pin-on-disc tribo-test system. The wear results demonstrated that using the TiN/TiCN layers with the DLC coatings increased the load carrying capacity, decreased the CoF, and wear rates at the high load values.