Simple Deconvolution Models for Evaluating the True Microhardness of Thin Nanostructured Coatings Deposited via an Advanced Physical Vapor Deposition Technique

This article discusses the micromechanical properties and true microhardness determination of nanostructured tribological coatings (NTCs) based on a multilayered alternating nitride/carbonitride bilayer substructure for transition metals. The constituent nitride/carbonitride bilayers in the superlattice structure of the NTC were alloyed with refractory metals, denoted as Me = Me1 or Me2= Cr, Hf, Nb, W, and Zr. The resulting NTC coatings were deposited onto 100Cr6 steel substrates using an advanced physical vapor deposition (PVD) technique, referred to here as high-power ion-plasma magnetron sputtering (HiPIPMS). The comprising crystalline nanometer-scale TiAlSiMe1-N/TiMe2-CN nanoparticles strengthened by Me additives significantly increased the NTC microhardness to over 3200 HV. The primary focus of this research was to determine the true microhardness of the NTC film samples. The apparent microhardness (Ha) of the film/substrate system for various NTC samples was measured during microindentation testing using the Vickers method. Nine NTC samples were tested, each generating a corresponding microindentation dataset containing between 430 and 640 imprints, depending on the specific NTC sample. These datasets were analyzed using three distinct empirical approaches: (i) the inverse power-law model (IPL-Model), (ii) the sigmoid-like decay model (SLD-Model), and (iii) the error function model (ERF-Model). The observed solid correlation between the proposed models and experiments suggests that the true microhardness estimates (Hf) obtained through the empirical mathematical modeling approach are reliable.