Study Of The Preparation And Characterization Of CrN_x Film On Stainless Steel Substrates By HPPUMS

In recent years, the unbalanced magnetron sputtering (UMS) technology has become one of the major film preparation methods. The UMS technology involves the metal materials, ceramic materials, semiconductor materials and other functional films. The application areas of UMS include mechanical application, electronic application, magnetic application, optical application and so on. Nowadays, the film comprehensive performances have become one of the standards to consider the film deposition technology was super or not. As a result, high power pulsed unbalanced magnetron sputtering (HPPUMS) technology appeared.High power pulsed unbalanced magnetron sputtering (HPPUMS) has high ionization rate and big sputtering energy of the particles. HPPUMS can prepare the films with dense structure, small surface roughness, strong adhesion strength and so on, which get more and more attentions from many scholars at home and abroad. In this paper, we used high power pulsed unbalanced magnetron sputtering (HPPUMS) technology to prepare a series CrNx films under different N2flow, and studied the film structure and properties.This paper used HPPUMS to prepare CrNx films on stainless steel substrate and investigated the influence of different N2flow to deposition rate, microstructure, friction coefficient, microhardness and corrosion resistance. We used the stylus profiler to measure the film thickness and calculate the deposition rate; X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses the microstructure of the films, and calculate the crystallite dimension by measuring the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the diffraction peak; Friction and wear tester and microhardness instrument measure the film coefficient of friction and microhardness; The electrochemical corrosion system tests the corrosion resistant of the films.The research result shown that the deposition rate of CrNx films which prepared by HPPUMS technology decreased with increasing N2flow, but in whole, the deposition rate was low, which consistent with the results in other literatures mentioned; The CrNx films comprised Cr and Cr2N two phases, there were no obvious changes with the increase of N2flow, the grain size calculated by FWHM of the Cr2N (202) diffraction peak decreased with increasing N2flow, which indicated that the quality of CrNx films became worse; The friction coefficient of the films were slightly larger than the substrate, but the results were generally small, which were between0.15to0.25. and also the alteration with the increase of N2flow were not significant; Because the films were thin, the hardness of the CrNx films were not very high; Under the circumstance of small thickness, the CrNx films still displayed strong corrosion resistance, and the corrosion potential of the films decreased with the increase of N2flow.