Exploring Tantalum Nitride: A Tribological Study on Thin Films

Thin films play an important role in the development and study of materials with new and unique properties. Thin films are very useful in this modern world because of their advantage of changing properties of the surface of a bulk material to our requirements. Thin films can be deposited on bulk materials by two types of processes said physical vapor deposition and chemical vapor deposition. Physical vapor deposition method has advantage of non-toxicity and better adhesion of thin towards bulk materials than chemical vapor deposition.The main objective of present work is to synthesize tantalum nitride based coating on glass, silicon, brass and mild steel substrates by using RF magnetron sputtering process. We have studied the effect of deposition time and nitrogen flow rate variation on the structural and tribological properties of tantalum nitride based coating. The deposition time for coating was varied from 20 to 80 min. The nitrogen flow rate was varied from 5 to 30 sccm. X-ray diffractometer (XRD) and Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) were used to determine structure and surface topography of coating. Pin on disc tribometer was used to determine tribological properties of coating.