View article

Weight-saving materials are becoming increasingly important, especially in the automotive and aerospace industries. Design engineers would thus like to make more extensive use of light metals such as aluminium, titanium, magnesium and their alloys; however, these materials tend to have poor wear resistance. Previous treatments and coatings applied to aluminium alloys, for example by traditional processes such as hard anodising and thermal spraying, have suffered from the low load support from the underlying material and/or insufficient adhesion, which reduces their durability. Also, although TiN-, CrN- or DLC-coated aluminium alloys (using various PVD methods) can achieve a high surface hardness, in practice they often exhibit poor performance under mechanical loading, since the coatings are usually too thin to protect the substrate from the contact conditions. In the work reported here, a plasma …