A review paper on tribological and mechanical properties of ternary nitride based coatings

The nanotribological studies are needed to develop fundamental understanding of interfacial phenomena on a smaller scale in nanostructures used in magnetic storage systems and other industrial applications. In several fields of technical application, e.g., in the automotive or aircraft industries, the reduction of friction and wear is a very important aspect with respect to longer lifetimes, increased service intervals and lower operation costs of tools, machines and other devices or mechanically loaded elements. Many researchers have studied tribological properties of various binary thin film materials to investigate various properties like adhesion, hardness and friction coefficients according to the respective applications. The different deposition techniques they used are Unbalanced Magnetron Sputtering. Ion Beam Assisted Deposition, Physical Vapour Deposition etc. Recently ternary nitride based coatings are invesitgated as they exhibit improved tribological, mechanical and thermal properties compared to binary nitride based coatings. This review paper is aimed to summarize tribological properties of three ternary nitride based coatings such as Titanium Aluminium Nitride, Titanium Vanadium Nitride and Titanium Molybdenum Nitride. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.