| Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 620172 | Wear | 2006 | 7 Pages |
High friction coefficients and severe galling have always hampered machining of stainless steel. Lubricants and special procedures in cutting and forming operations are common practice. Coatings deposited on tools in order to alter the adhesive nature of the stainless steel is an appealing idea and it has long been proposed as a solution to the problem. However, to date no coating, which is also capable of enduring the temperatures encountered during machining has successfully fulfilled that prophecy.Despite being one of the first PVD tool coatings commercially produced, titanium nitride (TiN) is still also one of the most widely used. A vast number of coatings have indeed joined TiN for tooling applications but none of these has excelled in contact with stainless steel. Using quantum calculations vanadium nitride (VN), a ceramic compound closely related to TiN, has recently been suggested to be much less prone to adhesive cladding to iron alloys than TiN. Experimental verification of those results is the focus of this work.Reactive electron beam evaporation is regarded as the premier method for producing TiN. Using that very method, VN and TiN coatings were produced for this work and tested in sliding in contact with stainless steel and other selected materials. In these tests VN is shown to be less prone to galling as compared to TiN, especially against stainless steel.
