Formation of carbon nitride - A novel hard coating

Increasing efforts have been reported on the formation of carbon nitride, Vapor deposition and simultaneous ion bombardment from accelerators or plasmas (IBAD) proved to be a successful technique for the preparation of this material. In our preparation, the properties of the films were controlled by varying the nitrogen ion energy and the flux composition ratio C/N. The deposited films with high nitrogen incorporation (C/N = 0.6 similar to 0.7) and low implantation energies (< 1.0 keV) showed high Knoop hardnesses of up to 63 GPa, XPS and FT-IR measurements indicated a high fraction of triple bonded C=N. X-ray diffraction showed an amorphous structure, Computer simulations by the dynamic TRIM code are used to study the formation parameters, nitrogen ion energy and C/N ratio. This turned on to be useful in understanding the formation process of the carbon nitride films grown on silicon wafers, fused silica and tungsten carbide substrates.