Adherence of sputtered titanium carbides

Sputtered coatings of the refractory metal carbides are of great interest for applications in which hard wear-resistant materials are desired. The usefulness of sputtered refractory carbides is often limited in practice by spalling or interfacial separation. In this work improvements in the adherence of refractory carbides on alloys based on iron, nickel and titanium were obtained by using oxidation, reactive sputtering or sputtered interlayers to alter the coating-substrate interfacial region. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and argon ion etching were used to characterize the interfacial regions, and an attempt was made to correlate adherence as measured in wear tests with the chemical nature of the interface.