New coatings by nanostructuring

A wide variety of functional properties (mechanical, wear, corrosion, fretting, weight, cost, bioreaction, etc.) can be optimized separately for the workpiece and the surface by applying an appropriate coating. To prevent extensive wear, abrasion-resistant coatings such as TiN, TiC, Ti(CN), and Al₂O₃as well as multilayer coatings such as WC/C and other multilayered combinations of the materials mentioned above are commonly used. For special requirements, e.g., temperature-sensitive substrates or limitations imposed by the workpiece or the environment, other coatings such as diamond-like carbon (DLC), polycrystalline diamond, cubic boron nitride (c-BN), and MoS₂are at hand for the various applications. In many cases the technical demands made on a workpiece cannot be fulfilled by a single coating material alone. Therefore, composite materials are developed, where different material properties are combined in such a way that new properties are created, which cannot be obtained by a single material alone. The final properties of such new materials are often controlled by the effects that the materials making up the composite have on each other.