Correlation between adhesion and wear behaviour of commercial carbon based coating

Adhesion and wear behaviour of hard coatings are two important properties that concern researchers. We need to use different tests to obtain these two values and the correlation between adhesion and wear is not always obvious. The purpose of this paper is to find the relationship between the wear rate and the critical load for commercial hard coatings.Commercial carbon based coatings were deposited on M42 high speed steel by magnetron sputtering. Different lengths of pre-sputtering time were used to change the properties of the coatings. Single pass scratch tests and multi-pass bidirectional wear tests were used to obtain the critical load and wear rate values, respectively. Results showed that there was a correlation between wear and adhesion. It was found that adhesion increases, and wear rate decreases when the pre-sputtering time increases. It was also observed that adhesion strength varies with pre-sputtering time in a step function manner. To a large extent, the adhesion behaviour is related to the wear behaviour as far as the commercial carbon based coating is concerned. However, as different coatings have different microstructure and properties, further work should be done to decide whether a similar relationship can be applied in other cases.