Advanced Tribological Characterization of DLC Coatings Produced by Ne-HiPIMS for the Application on the Piston Rings of Internal Combustion Engines

Piston rings (PR) are known for almost a quarter of the friction losses in internal combustion engines. This research work aims to improve the tribological performance of PR by a recently developed variant of Diamond-like Carbon (DLC) coatings deposited in a mixture of Ar and Ne plasma atmosphere (Ne-DLC) by high-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS). For the benchmark, the widely used Chromium Nitride (CrN) and DLCs deposited in pure Ar plasma atmosphere (Ar-DLC) were used. The tribological tests were performed on a block-on-ring configuration under different lubrication regimes by varying temperatures and sliding speeds. The analysis of the results was performed by Stribeck curves corresponding to each sample. An improvement of the tribological performance was observed for Ne-DLC films by up to 22.8% reduction in COF compared to CrN in the boundary lubrication regime, whereas, for the Ar-DLC film, this reduction was only 9.5%. Moreover, the Ne-DLC films achieved ultralow friction of less than 0.001 during the transition to a hydrodynamic lubrication regime due to better wettability (lower contact angle) and higher surface free energy. Increasing the Ne up to 50% in the discharge gas also leads to an increase of hardness of DLC films from 19 to 24 GPa.