Effect of oil temperature and counterpart material on the wear mechanism of ta-CNx coating under base oil lubrication

Tetrahedral amorphous carbon nitride (ta-CNx), as an emerging and promising diamond-like carbon (DLC), has better mechanical properties than amorphous carbon nitride (a-CNx) to ensure the sufficient durability, and overcomes the limit of high internal stress of tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C), which makes ta-CNx coatings of great worth of research for the tribological and mechanical applications. In this study, we present the effects of oil temperature and counterpart material on the wear behavior of ta-CNx coatings under base-oil lubrication, and further clarify the wear mechanism. ta-C and ta-CNx coatings with N/C atomic ratio of 2.2% and 11.0% were deposited by an ion beam assisted filtered arc deposition (IBA-FAD) system, and the tribological tests were performed using a ball-on-disk tribo-tester with ta-C and ta-CNx coated steel ball sliding against uncoated disk under base-oil lubrication. The results show that nitrogen doping tends to decrease the hardness and Young's modulus by reducing the sp3 structure. Sliding against steel disk, with increase of sliding distance ta-CNx shows obviously distinct wear behavior compared to ta-C, much more slowly increasing wear volume, exhibiting excellent wear resistance. Increasing oil temperature from room temperature to 120 °C results in rising wear rates of all the three coatings, with totally worn out ta-C and much lower wear rate of ta-CNx, which decreases by more than half than ta-C for high nitrogen content ta-CNx. However, as the counterpart material changed from steel to alumina, the wear rate presents oppositely increasing tendency with N/C ratio, probably caused by the change of deciding factor to hardness in this mechanical wear. It is found that the wear performance of ta-CNx coating has a clear dependence on the oil temperature and counterpart material. Based on the results, the better wear resistance of softer ta-CNx against steel could be attributed to the less tribo-chemical wear between carbon and iron, due to the nitrogen doping partial passivation effect.