The influence of plasma nitriding on microstructure and properties of CrN and CrNiN coatings on Ti6Al4V by magnetron sputtering

In this paper, the CrN and CrNiN coatings were deposited on the non-nitrided and nitrided Ti6Al4V alloys with the method of closed-field unbalanced magnetron sputter ion plating (CFUBMSIP). The influence of plasma nitriding treatment on microstructure, mechanical and tribological properties of Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) films was evacuated by means of SEM (EDS), XRD, Rockwell-C indentation testing, nanoindentation testing, and ball-on disc tribotesting. With the addition of Ni, the preferred orientation changes to CrN (200) and the grain is refined. The indentation tests indicated that the duplex treated samples exhibited the best combined properties. The nanoindentation testing results showed that the hardness of the coatings increased, the plastic deformation reduced and they had higher H3/E2 values than PVD coatings with the plasma nitriding before PVD treatment due to the increase of substrate's load bear capacity after plasma nitriding process. The friction and wear tests demonstrated that the tribological performance of the PVD coatings improved after plasma nitriding which is attributed to the enhanced the mechanical compatibility between the hard PVD coating and soft substrate and the resistance of CrN coating is better than that of CrNiN coating because of the transfer layer (constituted of TiN and Ti2N) deposited by nitriding.