The influence of the period size on the corrosion and the wear abrasion resistance of TiN/Ti multilayers

Metal-ceramic multilayers were deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering with the aim to simultaneously improve the corrosion and wear resistance of metallic substrates. In this paper we report the results of studies of the influence of the period size on the corrosion and the wear abrasion resistance of TiN/Ti multilayers deposited on H13 steel substrates. The Ti layers were deposited with thickness between 19 and 150 nm and TiN deposited with 22–150 nm; the number of periods was from 1 to 60. The wear was studied using a commercial ball cratering system and the corrosion with potentiodynamic polarizations in an electrolyte of NaCl 0.5 M. It was found that reducing the period also decreased the grain size and that the wear resistance of multilayer was improved; however the results of the corrosion testing were somewhat mixed. The results obtained for the periodic multilayers are compared with monolithic films. XRD analysis was used to study the influence of the period on the grain size and texture of the multilayers. Ion beam methods (RBS) were used to obtain the atomic composition profiles and the TiN/Ti multilayer thickness.