Experimental study by Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry focused on the relationship between hardness and sputtering rate in hard coatings

The applicability of this approach has been experimentally tested on several kind of hard coating films (as ZrN, TiN, TiAlCN et al.), including diamond-like (DLC) carbon materials. Some initial results pointed out the possibility to find a direct relationship between hardness and sputter rate, pointing out a good agreement with previous works. Nevertheless, detailed tests showed evident problems on DLC coatings. In this case the dependence between ion beam sputter rate and hardness is not evident and far to fit other experimental data. In our hypothesis this effect is related to the different nature of hardness on DLC materials.