Chemical, Mechanical, and Tribological Properties of Pulsed-Laser-Deposited Titanium Carbide and Vanadium Carbide

The chemical, mechanical, and tribological properties of pulsed‐laser‐deposited TiC and VC films are reported in this paper. Films were deposited by ablating carbide targets using a KrF (λ= 248 nm) laser. Chemical analysis of the films by XPS revealed oxygen was the major impurity; the lowest oxygen concentration obtained in a film was 5 atom%. Oxygen was located primarily on the carbon sublattice of the TiC structure. The films were always substoichiometric, as expected, and the carbon in the films was identified primarily as carbidic carbon. Nanoindentation hardness tests gave values of 39 GPa for TiC and 26 GPa for VC. The friction coefficient for the TiC films was 0.22, while the VC film exhibited rapid material transfer from the steel ball to the substrate resulting in steel‐on‐steel tribological behavior.