The struggle against wear is not a simple application of the Archard law who restraints to thin abrasion and summarizes like “the harder it is, the less it wears”. The IREIS teams can analyze the type of wear (expertise, tests, bench simulation) within a large variety of existing mechanism and propose adapted coatings. We propose a large variety of hard thin layers who can be used in surface protection applications.
The physicochemical nature of the hard thin layers is part of the fundamental knowledge. For example to battle against adhesive wear, we chose a coating without chemicals affinities with the antagonistic material. Another well known example concerns the chrome base coatings which allows to reduce the wear by adhesion of a copper antagonist.
In many applications, fighting against wear by abrasion passes by the use of the hardest coatings like DLC or also TiBN. In this example, the resistance to abrasion by a diamond suspension (1/4µm) is given according to the roughness of amorphous carbon thin layers. However, using thin layers is not as easy as it seems because depending of the size of the abrasive particles in view of the coating, we solicit the coating or the substrate through the coating.
In other configurations, the erosion wear is characterized by 2 opposite incidence conditions of the erosive particles, who necessitate 2 antagonistic properties: for the razing incidence, a material will be all the more performing as he is hard whereas in normal incidence, a material is all the more performing as he is tough. Therefore, the elaboration of thick multilayers structures, associating 2 materials give a global answer more satisfying than all the layers taken individually.