ABSTRACTNowadays the demands placed upon the tooling in processes such as cutting, drilling, milling, stamping, bending, etc. are constantly growing and restrictive. On one hand, productivity, cost efficiency and quality all require high-speed processes to be developed. On the other hand, environmental safety requires very little or no lubricant to be used (dry cutting or minimized spray-lubrication). When combined, these two considerations mean: the tool should wear very little, withstand high temperatures and the friction between the tool and the work piece should be minimized. An apparent approach to simultaneously satisfying such requirements is coating the tools with self-lubricating hard coatings. Quaternary TiAlCN is a rapidly developing hard coating suitable for a number of cutting applications. The well-known wear-resistant coating TiN has been demonstrated to have improved high-temperature oxidation resistance when aluminum is included, i.e. TiAl N. Addition of yet a fourth element, carbon, has the primary effect of lowering the high friction coefficient occurring between the ceramic coating and steel. The high hardness, toughness, heat resistance and low friction coefficient of TiAlCN make it the ideal candidate for applications such as milling, hobbing, tapping, stamping and punching. MoS2 is a well-known solid lubricant widely used as tribological coatings, especially for applications working in vacuum or dry environment. Combining the wear resistance of the quaternary TiAlCN matrix with the lubricating properties of MoS2 has an extremely beneficial effect in further improving the tribological performance of the resulting composite. The coatings were deposited on hardmetal (WC-Co) and Si (100) substrates using reactive magnetron sputtering. The structure of the coatings is studied by plain-view TEM and XTEM, electron diffraction and ED X. The tribological properties were examined by Pin-on-Disk (PoD) tribometer. The adhesion was estimated by scratch test, and the hardness was measured by nanoindentation. All the coatings examined had a very low friction coefficient (typically below 0.09) and volumetric wear rate against 100Cr6 steel (AISI 52100) of 7.10-7 mm3/N/m. The relation of deposition parameters to structure to properties is discussed. To the authors knowledge, this is the first paper describing quaternary TiAlCN matrix with inclusions of MoS2.
