The mainly property of thin solid films technologies is their adhesion to the substrates. Because of its good wear resistance and its low coefficient of friction against steel, TiC is an attractive coating material for wear applications such as bearing components. The adhesion of TiC coatings, however suffers from insufficient reproducibility, which is probably due to uncontrolled process parameters. In our work pure titanium thin films of approximately 0.6 µm in thickness were prepared on 100C6 stainless steel substrates by cathodic sputtering. The samples were subjected to secondary vacuum annealing at a temperature between 400 and 1000°C for 30 min. The reaction between substrates and thin films was characterized using an x-ray diffractometer (XRD). Surface morphology and elements diffusion evaluations were carried out by scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). The interaction substrates-thin films is accompanied by nucleation and growth of titanium carbide as a function of annealing temperature. By the SEM and EDS results, it appears clearly that the diffusion of manganese to the external layers leads to the destruction of adhesion especially at high temperatures.
