Effect Of Coating Thickness On The Microstructure, Mechanical And Wear Properties Of A1TiN Coatings Deposited Using Arc Ion Plating Technique

• Main Author: Kadhim, Kamil Jawad
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English; English
• Published: UTeM 2016
• Subjects: T Technology (General); TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
• Online Access: http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/18549/1/Effect%20Of%20Coating%20Thickness%20On%20The%20Microstructure%2C%20Mechanical%20And%20Wear%20Properties%20Of%20A1TiN%20Coatings%20Deposited%20Using%20Arc%20Ion%20Plating%20Technique%2024%20Pages.pdf; http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/18549/2/Effect%20Of%20Coating%20Thickness%20On%20The%20Microstructure%2C%20Mechanical%20And%20Wear%20Properties%20Of%20AlTiN%20Coatings%20Deposited%20Using%20Arc%20Ion%20Plating%20Technique.pdf; http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/18549/; https://plh.utem.edu.my/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=101739

AlTiN coatings were deposited on tungsten carbide insert using Al 0.67 TI0.33 cathodes in cathodic arc plating system. The influence of coating layer thickness on the microstructural, mechanical and wear properties of the coatings was investigated. The AlTiN deposition of hard coatings for tooling applications has many advantages. The main drawback of this technique, however, is the formation of macro particles (MPs) during deposition. The deposited AlTiN coating of various thickness was characterized using X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), Rockwell tester, and ball-on-disc machine, to analyze and quantify the following coating properties: grain size, preferred orientation, atomic elements, thickness, micro hardness, adhesion, surface roughness, and coefficient of friction (COF) of the deposited coatings. Base of this study, the increase in layer thickness was closely related to increase in deposition time. The coating thickness had a significant influence on the width of crater wear. The width of crater wear reduced significantly as the coating thickness increased. However beyond 5.815μm, further increment in coating thickness resulted in increase in crater wear width due to presence of larger macro-particles on the coating surface and reduction of coating hardness. The deposited AlTiN coating also showed a strong preferred orientation of (200) and (111) plane for all coating thickness. The values of various surface roughness measured by AFM was at minimum of 0.07157 μm for the coating having thickness of 2.717 μm whereas; the maximum value of Ra was 0.29647 μm for the coating thickness of 8.760 μm. The highest hardness value was 1939.0 HV for coating thickness of 5.815 μm. Based on adhesion slope technique, AlTiN coatings of 3.089 μm thickness had the best adhesion strength. Correlation study indicated that cutting tools crater wear width has the strongest correlation with the coating atomic percentage ratio of Al/Ti, with coefficient of determination R 2 value of 0.7251. The coating hardness and grain size also indicated some correlation with the crater width wear with R2 values of 0.6051 and 0.5184 respectively.