| Abstract: | A new method has been developed for tribological testing of thin, hard antiwear coatings, using a ball‐on‐disc tribosystem, under conditions of dry sliding. In this, an Al2O3 ball is pressed against a coated steel disc. Wear debris is removed from the contact zone by a stream of dry argon in this novel method. This improves the stability of the tribological properties and the repeatability of the test results. All test conditions are precisely defined, in particular: the type of motion, air relative humidity, ambient temperature, sliding speed, load, tribosystem spatial configuration, substrate material, substrate hardness and roughness, and coating thickness. The method developed has been used to test various physical vapour deposition coatings (deposited by the vacuum arc method), i. e., single‐layer TiN, Ti(C,N), CrN, and Cr(C,N), and multilayer Cr(C,N)/CrN/Cr and Cr(C,N)/(CrN+Cr2N)/CrN/Cr. It is shown that CrN coatings exhibit the best antiwear properties, and Ti(C,N) the worst. Friction coefficients for CrN and Cr(C,N) coatings are much lower than for the more commonly used TiN. Multilayer coatings have better antiwear properties than single‐layer ones. |
