Effect of the Plasma Deposition Parameters on the Properties of Ti/TiC Multilayers for Hard Coatings Applications

Titanium carbide (TiC) hard coatings have been obtained on steel and silicon substrates by rf magnetron sputtering process. Two layer coatings have been deposited in order to improve adhesion on steel. The lower layer was titanium metal and the upper TiC layer was obtained by reactive sputtering of the titanium target in Ar and methane gas mixture. The study confirmed that the TiC layer composition depends on the reactive sputtering gas composition and substrate bias voltage. Film microhardness was measured by microindentation. Measurement results showed that the hardness coating depends on the microstructure of our coatings and the polarization of bias substrate is an important parameter to control the microstructure.