The influence of titanium interlayers on the adhesion of PVD TiN coatings on oxidized stainless steel substrates

It has been shown that the use of thin titanium interlayers improves the coating-substrate adhesion of physical vapour deposition (PVD) titanium nitride thin films on a stainless steel substrate. This improvement arises from a combination of chemical gettering and mechanical compliance effects. The improved adhesion of plasma-assisted chemical vapour deposition TiN coatings with increasing interlayer thickness has been shown to be largely attributable to the compliance effect. The development of practical methods to improve adhesion is hampered by the difficulties involved in quantitative measurements of the effect. To avoid the influence of the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters involved in scratch test and microhardness measurements, efforts have been made to apply fracture mechanical testing methods to the determination of the adhesion strength of the film on the substrate (S. Berg, S. W. Kim, V. Grajewski and E. Fromm, Mater. Sci. Eng. A, 139 (1991) 345). In our study the influence of Ti interlayers on the adhesion of PVD TiN coatings on oxidized stainless steel substrates was investigated using a pull-off test for adhesion measurements and scanning tunnelling microscopy and secondary ion mass spectrometry for analysis of the fractured surfaces. It was shown that the thickness of the Ti layer must be chosen according to the thickness of the oxide layer. An excess of Ti leads to lower adhesion values due to failure in the Ti layer, while a shortage of Ti leads to unreacted oxide and minimum adhesion due to brittle fracture in the oxide layer, which was shown to be amorphous. (orig.)