Wear performance of Y-doped nanolayered CrN/AlN coatings

Abstract

The incorporation of yttrium (Y) in CrAlN based hard coatings has been known to be able to improve the oxidation resistance and thermal stability of these coatings, which is an important characteristic for protective coatings at high temperatures. However, there has been limited information available for the effects of Y doping on the tribological properties of such coatings, especially the wear performance. In this paper, a systematic investigation on the triblogical properties of CrAlN coatings doped with different levels of Y was conducted to correlate the coatings' microstructural, mechanical and tribological properties with their Y contents. The results showed that the wear performance of the coatings decreased with increasing Y doping, though the coatings doped with low to moderate Y contents had comparable wear performance with the pristine CrAlN coatings