Tribological behavior of a novel Si- and WC- co-reinforced a-C multilayer coating at 25– 500 °C.

To improve the applicability of a-C coatings in a wide temperature range, a novel Si- and WC- co-reinforced amorphous carbon coating (SiC-nWCC), consisting of Si-doped a-C nanolayers and WC/a-C nano-multilayers, is proposed in this paper. A series of SiC-nWCC coatings with different modulation ratios (0.49–1.98) were fabricated by a closed field unbalanced magnetron sputtering system. The influences of modulation ratio on the microstructure, mechanical properties together with thermal stability of SiC-nWCC coatings were explored. The tribological behaviors of SiC-nWCC coatings against M50 steel balls were investigated at room temperature to 500 °C in ambient air. The results show that the SiC-nWCC coating with the modulation ratio of 1.98 achieved superior wide-temperature applicability, featuring the average friction coefficient lower than 0.17 and the wear rate less than 9.84 × 10−6 mm3/N·m in the whole temperature range of 25–500 °C. The excellent wide-temperature tribological performance of the SiC-nWCC coating are mainly attributed to the good thermal stability and the formation of temperature adaptive tribological layers. At 25 °C, sp2-rich carbon is the main lubrication phase of tribological layers, and at 200– 400 °C, the lubrication performance of coating relies on both sp2-rich carbon and Si-rich oxides, and at 500 °C, the self-lubrication phases of Si-rich oxides and WO 3 are account for the outstanding lubricating performance of coating. This work provides a profound insight for developing the wide-temperature applicable a-C based coatings. • A novel wide-temperature applicable nanocomposite multilayer SiC-nWCC film is proposed. • SiC-nWCC film with modulation ratio of 1.98 achieves superior tribology performance at 25– 500 °C in ambient air. • Wide-temperature adaptive lubrication mechanism is the combination effects of sp2-rich carbon, Si-rich oxides and WO 3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]