Soft and thick DLC deposited on AISI 316L stainless steel with nitriding as pre-treatment tested in severe wear conditions

Thick and soft DLC coatings were deposited over stainless steel to improve their surface properties, protecting them from wear in different conditions. When a protective film is thick, it can be considered as self-sustaining in terms of load-carrying capacity during wear situations even if the substrate is soft or hard. Thin and hard DLC coatings are well known for having high hardness and low friction coefficient; however they have adhesion problems when deposited on soft steels and many of their wear properties also depend on adhesion. For this reason, a previous plasma nitriding process may be convenient. In this work, the fretting and erosion wear behaviour of DLC soft coatings deposited on nitrided and non-nitrided austenitic stainless steel was evaluated using high loads and long tests both simulating severe conditions wear. The aim is to analyse under which conditions the film thickness is not enough to withstand wear damage when deposited onto soft steels. The results showed that in the fretting tests, the duplex sample presented better resistance than the only coated sample in all tested conditions, except for the minimum load, 12 N. In slurry erosion tests, the mass loss was similar in both samples until nine hours, when the influence of the nitrided layer became noticeable as a hard layer since the coating partially removed.