Effect of residual stress on the wear behavior of magnetron sputtered V–Al–N coatings deposited at the substrate temperature <200°C

Residual stress is believed to greatly influence wear behavior of physical vapor deposition coatings, especially for those deposited at low substrate temperatures. Here, comparison and evaluation were performed on friction-wear behavior of the V–Al–N coatings that were deposited with the <200 °C substrate temperature. The hardness and the compressive stress of coatings varied from 14.1 GPa to 35.5 GPa and 0.06 GPa–3.83 GPa, when the substrate bias increased from 0 to −20 V. Low wear rates (∼10−16 m3/N m) were achieved in the V0.43Al0.57N coatings with medium compressive stress (∼3 GPa). By contrast, the specific wear rate increased by two orders of magnitude (∼2.8 × 10−14 m3/N m) when the compressive stress increased to −3.83 ± 0.24 GPa. Therefore, it could be concluded that the highly strained coatings were generally subjected to fractured-dominated wear, which should be avoided in developing low-wear transition nitride hard coatings.