The Deposition And Properties Of TiC/a-C:H Films

The film with high hardness was deposited on the aluminum alloy substrate, there has poor adhesion strength between the films and substrate of aluminium alloy because of big differences in composition and properties of film and substrate, which easily lead to the failure of protecting coating.The composite film consisting of titanium carbide and amorphous carbon phases has relative lower intensive stress comparing with diamond like carbon films. The composition, structure and properties of films, especially the mechanical and tribological properties, have big change with the variation of mental content, The hardness of film with certain composition is much higher than it of TiC films, and tribological properties of film with other certain compositon can be improved, the friction coefficient is close to it of amorphous carbon film. This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.50271004), and the titanium carbide/ hydrogenate amorphous carbon composite films, e.g. TiC/a-C:H films is studied in this work, including the effects of titanium content on the composition, structure, and the change of mechanical and tribological properties of films. Adhesion strength of TiC/a-C:H films with aluminum alloy substrate is also be studied in work, and method of ion implantation is used to improve the adhesion, which achieves good effect.TiC/a-C:H films is deposited on the LY12 substrate by reactive magnetron sputtering, the acetylene is introduced as reactive gas, and the composition of films is modulated by varying flux of acetylene, so a series of TiC/a-C:H films with different composition is deposited. The different substrate bias is also used in deposition to study the influence of substrate bias. The composition and structure are measured by XPS (X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy) and GAXRD (glancing angle X-ray diffraction). The carbon exist as hydrogenate amorphous phase (a-C:H) besides combine with the titanium and format TiC phase. The titanium atomic content decrease with increase of acetylene flux, and the a-C:H phase concentration increase with decrease of titanium content in films, the grain size decrease as well. TiC grain has obvious (200) preferred orientation with high bias, and the grain size calculated decrease with increase of bias. The results measured by Raman spectra show that the substrate bias also increase the concentration of sp3 bonding in a-C:H phase.The emphasis of this work is mechanical properties of films deposited with different process parameters. The hardness and elastic modulus have obvious enhancement with Ti...