Mechanical, tribological and erosion behaviour of super-elastic hard Ti–Si–C coatings prepared by PECVD

Titaniun carbide (TiC) based coatings prepared by low temperature Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) are investigated as attractive candidates for wear resistance, and particularly for protection against solid particle erosion. In the present work, we incorporated silicon (Si) as an alloying element to TiC, to obtain ternary nanostructured Ti–Si–C films. The incorporation of Si in TiC resulted in significant microstructural, mechanical and tribological modifications. By controlling the Si content in the films, we observed a transition between films consisting of fine nano-sized TiC crystallites (nc-TiC) embedded in an amorphous C:H matrix (a-C:H) to a microstructure formed by nc-TiC encapsulated in a-SiC/a-C:H matrix. This allowed one to selectively control the main mechanical characteristics, namely the hardness (H), the Young's modulus (E), and the friction coefficient (μ), in the range of 14–32 GPa, 140–240 GPa, and 0.16–0.6, respectively. For films prepared under optimized conditions, high elastic strain to failure and high resistance to plastic deformation of the Ti–Si–C films, expressed by H/E and H3/E2 ratios, resulted in an 8 fold increase of the erosion resistance at an impact angle of 90° compared to a bare steel substrate. Erosion resistance at 30° increased by a factor of 22 compared to bare substrate due to a simultaneous combination of high H and low μ. Taking into consideration the severe erosion test conditions and the Ti–Si–C film thickness of less than 5 μm in this work, further improvement is expected for thicker films.