Deposition of tungsten nitride on stainless steel substrates using plasma focus device

Highlights: →Deposition of tungsten nitride thin films on stainless steel 304 substrates. → Deposition using low-energy plasma focus device. → Effect of number of focus shots and angular position relative to anode axis. → Particle sizes increase then decrease with increasing number of shots. → Sub-micro structures and crystallites increase then decrease with number of shots. -- Abstract: Tungsten nitride (WN) films were deposited on the stainless steel-304 substrate by a 2 kJ Mather-type plasma focus device. The preparation method and characterization data are presented. X-ray diffractometer (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) were employed for the characterization of the samples obtained with different number of focus shots, respectively. The average size of crystallites (from XRD), sub-micro-structures (from SEM) and particles (from AFM images) increase when the number of shots increase from 10 to 20 then 30, then they decrease when the substrate is exposed to 40 shots.