Wear-resistant coating and component

Stock material or miscellaneous articles – All metal or with adjacent metals – Composite; i.e. – plural – adjacent – spatially distinct metal...

Reexamination Certificate

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C428S696000, C428S697000, C428S699000, C428S623000, C428S628000, C428S457000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06287711

ABSTRACT:

BACKGROUND
The present invention relates to a wear-resistant coating and component.
In production of tools, molds, and machine parts, various types of coatings have been applied to a substrate to improve properties such as hardness, wear resistance, corrosion resistance, lubricity, ductility, strength, and elasticity. Unfortunately, many of these properties are mutually exclusive for a given material. Thus one material or composition may possess good hardness but may not have lubricity or some other desirable property. For example, a coating of a boride, carbide, nitride or carbonitride of titanium, hafnium, or zirconium is very hard, but lacks lubricity or ductility, which is a desirable property for machine components. On the other hand, lubricious materials such as germanium and fluorocarbons do not possess sufficient hardness or wear resistance. Hard coating materials such as diamond-like carbon and titanium diboride are usually very brittle which limits their wear resistance. The high internal stress also prohibits depositing thick coating material which is crucial in some tribological applications such as wear reduction in hard particle erosion environment.
Multilayer coating technology is increasingly used in improving properties of tools and components because multiple layers of materials having different properties can be tailored to provide a particular combination of desirable and opposing properties such as for example, hardness, lubricity, and ductility. Suitable multilayer coatings include combinations of hard crystalline layers, such as TiC or TiN, and lubricative amorphous carbon layers. However, the amorphous carbon coating easily peels off from underlying TiC or TiN layer during or immediately after formation of the coating because of the high thermal and internal stress of the amorphous carbon layer and its poor compatibility with underlying TiC or TiN layer. Thus intermediate layers having complex compositions are required to adhere the TiC/TiN layer to the amorphous carbon layer or vice versa. These layers include graded composition layers which have a changing composition of carbon and TiC or TiN through their thickness. The graded composition layers are difficult to fabricate and often have undesirable properties of low hardness or lubricity.
Thus there is a need for a coating for a wear-resistant component that exhibits high hardness and wear resistance, as well as opposing properties of lubricity and ductility. There is a further need for a multilayer or multi-component coating that can be strongly adhered to a component. There is also a need for a method of making a wear-resistant component that efficiently and reliably coats the component with a hard and ductile coating.
SUMMARY
The present invention satisfies these needs by providing a hard, wear-resistant coating component including a coating comprising crystalline layers and amorphous layers. In one embodiment, the wear-resistant component comprises (a) a workpiece and (b) a coating on the workpiece, the coating comprising (i) a crystalline layer comprising metal boride and (ii) an amorphous layer comprising metal and boron. The crystalline layer comprises metal boride having the general formula MeB
x
where Me represents metal and x represents 1 to 4. The amorphous layer can further comprise one or more of carbon, nitrogen, halogen, or hydrogen. In another embodiment, the coating further comprises an interface layer between the crystalline layer and the amorphous layer, the interface layer comprising a variable stoichiometry of metal and boron that changes through the thickness of the interface layer.
The present invention further provides a method of making the hard, wear-resistant component, the method comprising the steps of:
(a) placing a workpiece into a process chamber having a target comprising metal boride;
(b) introducing a sputtering gas into the process chamber and forming a plasma from the sputtering gas to sputter the target and deposit a crystalline layer comprising metal boride on the workpiece; and
(c) before or after step (b), introducing a reactive gas into the process chamber and maintaining process conditions suitable for depositing an amorphous layer comprising metal and boron on the workpiece.
The wear-resistant coating component provided by the present invention combines the extreme hardness of a crystalline layer with the self-lubricity and ductility of an amorphous layer to create a new family of hard and wear-resistant components.


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