Micro-tribology experiments on engineering coatings

A new tribometer has been designed to carry out micro and nanoscale tribological experiments. The system has been designed for both use on the laboratory bench and in situ in a scanning electron microscope, although the preliminary experiments reported in this paper were carried out on the laboratory bench. Experiments have been carried out under a range of coatings to validate the testing system and examine frictional performance and durability. The damage to the coatings that was caused by single and multiple pass experiments under a range of different loading conditions was evaluated using confocal microscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM) topography measurement, and in some cases scanning electron microscopy (SEM) stereo reconstruction, as well as high resolution SEM.