Composition driven phase evolution and mechanical properties of Mo–Cr–N hard coatings

Although many research activities concentrate on transition metal nitrides, due to their excellent properties, only little is known about Mo-N based materials. We investigate in detail the influence of Cr on the structural evolution and mechanical properties of Mo-N coatings prepared at different nitrogen partial pressures. The chemical composition as well as the structural development of coatings prepared with N-2-to-total pressure ratios (p(N2)/p(T)) of 0.32 and 0.44 can best be described by the quasi-binary Mo2N-CrN tie line. Mo2N and CrN are face centered cubic (fcc), only that for Mo2N half of the N-sublattice is vacant. Consequently, with increasing Cr content, also the N-sublattice becomes less vacant and the chemical composition of fcc single-phase ternaries can be described as Mo1-xCrxN0.5(1+x). These coatings exhibit an excellent agreement between experimentally and ab initio obtained lattice parameters of fcc Mo1-xCrxN0.5(1+x). When increasing the N-2-to-total pressure ratio to pN(2)/p(T) = 0.69, the N-sublattice is already fully occupied for Cr-additions of x >= 0.4, as suggested by elastic recoil detection analysis and lattice parameter variations. The latter follows the ab initio obtained lattice parameters along the quasi-binary MoN-CrN tie line for x >= 0.5. The single-phase fcc coating with Cr/(Mo+Cr) of x similar to 0.2, prepared with pN(2)/p(T) = 0.32, exhibits the highest hardness of similar to 34 GPa among all coatings studied. (C) 2015 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License