Industrially-styled room-temperature pulsed laser deposition of titanium-based coatings

The current paper summarizes the application of the industrially-scaled PLD technique on the deposition of the presently most important Ti-based coatings: metallic titanium, titanium nitride (TiN), titanium oxide (TiO2) and titanium carbonitride (TiCN). PLD coating allows, even at room temperature, the formation of film structures of Zone-T type of Thornton's structure zone model, both on substrates aligned normal and parallel to the incident vapor flux. The high-energetic deposition conditions are revealed by the occurrence of (2 2 0) textures for the fcc TiN-based films. The dense grown structure affects advantageously the tribological behavior-generally, low wear rates and (for TiCN) very low friction coefficients were found. For TiO2 coatings, growing as a mixture of β-TiO2 and amorphous phases, the easily reproducible change of deposition parameters in the room-temperature PLD allows large differences in the optical transmission and electrical resistance.