On the effect of substrate oscillation on CrN coatings deposited by HiPIMS and dcMS

There are plenty of deposition techniques to produce hard coatings. Among them, Direct Current Magnetron Sputtering (dcMS) and High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering (HiPIMS) are known to produce dense coatings with few or no growth defects. Transition metal nitrides are widely used for tribological applications. CrN has been described as a high hardness, high wear resistant coating therefore making an ideal candidate to be deposited by sputtering. Although the use of multilayers have been described as a mean to further increase wear resistance, no study has presented the effect of a multilayer produced by the oscillation of the substrate during the deposition process. This paper presents a study of the effect of the oscillation on the production of these multilayer and its effects on the mechanical and structural properties of the coating. Furthermore, the effects of bias and frequency on these properties were evaluated. To characterize the coatings it was used XRD, SEM, AFM, Nanohardness and Corrosion tests. The XRD results showed higher texture on (311) plane for −60 V for HiPIMS deposition for all frequencies leading to higher hardness. Compressive residual stresses were found to grow as the bias increased for HiPIMS deposition, whereas dcMS led to the opposite behavior. Finally, dcMS coatings presented similar corrosion resistance when compared to HiPIMS coatings. •Oscillation of the substrate produces multilayers due to change of growth orientation.•Hardness showed no dependence of HiPIMS frequency on the investigated range.•In HiPIMS residual stresses grow with bias whereas dcMS exhibits opposite behavior.•Optimized HiPIMS and dcMS produce coatings with similar corrosion resistance.