Enhanced Tribological Performance of CVD Diamond Films Enabled by Using Graphene Layers as Solid Lubricant

The present study reports the influence of graphene layers on the tribological performance of CVD diamond films when they are used as the solid lubricants. Friction tests are conducted on a ball-on-plate friction tester, where the stainless steel is used as the counterpart material. The CVD diamond film sample is a typical microcrystalline diamond (MCD) coating which is deposited on a flat tungsten carbide substrate using the hot filament chemical vapor deposition method (HFCVD). Besides the MCD sample, a polished MCD film (pMCD) and a polished tungsten carbide (pWC) are also adopted in frictional tests, aiming at illustrating the influence of the surface morphology, as well as the physical property, of the sample on the lubricative effect of graphene layers. The experimental results show that graphene layers can effectively reduce the coefficient of friction (COF), regardless of the samples. The MCD sample presents the lowest stable COF, which is 0.13, in dry sliding period when the graphene flakes are sparyed on the sliding interface; while the pMCD and pWC samples exhibit slightly higher COFs, which are 0.16 and 0.18, respectively. Comparatively, the COFs of these three samples obtained in dry sliding process without graphene are 0.20, 0.25 and 0.64. In additon, the MCD sample exhibits a much longer stable dry slidng process which is more than 5000 cycles. Comparatively, the other two tribo-pairs only exhibit a stable low-COF dry sliding period for around 2000 cycles. The reduction of COF could be attributed to the graphene flakes adhered on the sliding interface. It forms a layer of solid lubricative film with extremely low shear strength and significantly decreases the interactions between two contacted surfaces. The rugged surface of the MCD film provides sufficient clogging locations for graphene flakes, which allows the generated lubricative film enduring a long sliding duration. It can be arrived from this study that the tribological properties of the MCD film could be enhanced by simply adoping graphene layers as a solid lubricant. Furthermore, an improved performance of a variety of MCD coated cutting tools or mechanical components could be expected when they are utilized with graphene layers.