Tribological performance of the laser surface treated CrZrSiN thin films

Recently, surface texturing by atmospheric laser processing has been received lots of attention to improve the tribological performance of various surfaces and this laser texturing of surfaces could be considered in a large extent to improve tribological performance of PVD coated surface. Surface texturing could be performed by various manufacturing techniques such as indentation with hard materials, ion etching, abrasive jet machining, lithography, and Laser Surface Texturing (LST). Out of all these techniques, however it is generally accepted that laser surface texturing (LST) by atmospheric laser processing offers the most promising process as LST is very fast, environmentally-friendly, easy to control the shape and size of the microdimples. In this work various preliminary experimental results from the laser texturing on the PVD-coated steel substrate will be presented. Our results indicated that laser texturing definitely affect the tribological performance of the surfaces and the size as well as pattern type of laser texturing are one of the key factors. From the wear tests against an alumina counterpart ball at room temperature under oil-lubricated condition, laser surface texturing on the CrZrSiN films reduced the friction coefficients by approximately more than 5 times in the case of narrow patterned surfaces.