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In the present study, Ti–Al–V–N coatings were synthesized onto Ti–6Al–4V substrates by plasma enhanced magnetron sputtering (PEMS) of two commercial sputter targets of Ti–6Al–4V in an Ar/N 2 gas mixture. After that, the as-synthesized coatings were annealed in air atmosphere at temperature ranging from 500 °C to 900 °C. The as-synthesized and annealed coatings were characterized by X-ray diffraction, Vickers microhardness tester, ball-on-disk tribometer and potentiodynamic polarization tests. The as-synthesized coatings showed a surface hardness of about 2980 ± 80 HV 0.3 and a friction coefficient of 0.36. It has been revealed with the increase of annealing temperature; the microhardness was gradually decreased and reached a minimum value of 1030 ± 30 HV 0.3 at 900 °C. The coefficient of friction has a minimum value of 0.27 for coatings annealed at 600 °C. Potentiodynamic polarization test confirmed that thermally annealed samples (≤600 °C) exhibit a better corrosion performance compared to that of the as-synthesized one. However, at relatively higher annealing temperature (700–900 °C), a small degradation in the corrosion performance was observed with the formation of oxidized phases. Finally, the variation in the mechanical and tribological properties of this coating with annealing temperatures is attributed to changes in microstructure and chemical nature of the surface layer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Titanium nitrides have good mechanical, biomedical and optical properties, therefore they are used to harden and protect cutting and sliding surfaces and as a non-toxic exterior for bio-medical applications. Nitrogen plasma immersion implantation (PIII), in which the diffusion of nitrogen from low pressure r.f. plasma is combined with the implantation of nitrogen ions at energies up to 30kV, is an effective tool for nitriding titanium and titanium alloys. In this work, samples of pure titanium were nitrided by PIII at different negative high voltage pulses. The properties and the characteristics of the processed samples were evaluated using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Auger electron spectroscopy (AES), ball-on-disk type tribometer, surface profilemeter, and ellipsometry measurements. The results show that, the wear resistance of the untreated sample in comparison to the PIII treated samples is extremely poor and the friction coefficient for the PIII treated samples is decreased to the half value in comparison to the untreated titanium, this attributed to the formation of the solid solution titanium α-Ti(N) and the cubic TiN phases. Ellipsometric measurements were carried out on the PIII treated samples at different negative high voltage pulses. A three layers model was used to fit the calculated data to the experimental ellipsometric spectra. The thickness, surface roughness and refractive index increase with increasing the negative high voltage pulses. The refractive index at 550nm increases from 1.83 to 2.09 as the negative high voltage pulses increases from 10 to 30kV. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]