Wear behaviours of filtered cathodic arc deposited TiN, TiAlSiN and TiCrAlSiN coatings on AISI 316 stainless steel fishing net-weaving machine components under dry soft-sliding against nylon fibres

The aim of this work was to study the wear behaviours and mechanisms of Ti-based coatings deposited by a filtered cathodic arc process on fishing net-weaving machine components, namely hooks, under dry soft-sliding against nylon fibres. A set of dry soft-sliding experiments were conducted on AISI 316 stainless steel hooks with filtered cathodic arc-deposited TiN, TiAlSiN and TiCrAlSiN films along with uncoated and hard-chrome plated ones. The results showed that Ti-based coatings offered substantially better wear resistance improvement for stainless steel hooks than hard-chrome plating in an accelerated dry soft-sliding condition of a net-weaving machine. Among the three Ti-based coatings, TiAlSiN coating displayed the best dry soft-sliding wear resistant characteristics with the lowest wear rate and the longest maximum sliding distance of 189 km, which was about 5 times as high as that of uncoated one due to superior hardness and chemical properties. Microstructural analyses suggested that the wear mechanisms of hard tool surface such as TiAlSiN mainly involved repetitive two-step adhesive wear processes including a corrugated transfer film onto the hard surface and the subsequent detachment of transfer film along with the outermost layer of hard material. Moreover, the hard-chrome plated hook exhibited a rather high wear rate despite its low surface roughness due to rapid material detachment by the adhesive fracture wear mechanisms.