Corrosion resistance evaluation of carbon and vanadium-based sputtered coatings on steel substrates

Abstract

Abstract Steels are in constant contact with fluids that could generate corrosion regardless the application in which this steel is located. AISI-SAE 1045 like steels is widely used in different applications in engineering, even several of these parts made of this steel suffers wear processes. The synergy between corrosion and wear phenomena exacerbates the detriment of some physical properties of the material conducing it to a failure. A potential alternative to avoid this issue is to coat the material surface with an anticorrosive material, and among different techniques to produce coatings, physical vapor deposition ones are environmentally friendly, secure and with excellent properties on the final product. We report the production of coatings based on vanadium and carbon on AISI-SAE 1045 steels substrates varying some of the deposition parameters in a sputtering coatings machine. A 23-factorial design of experiments was done with power applied to the vanadium target, power applied to the carbon target and temperature as active factors with two levels each one. A relevant effect of the power applied to V target and temperature on the anticorrosive properties of the coatings was found, thus increasing these factors levels always gives higher surface roughness and higher corrosion rates, this result together provides an important insight into the values that must be considered to achieve good anticorrosive properties on the material. Overall, these results indicate that with low V target power and room temperature, and high C target power the lowest corrosion rates and roughness of the group are achieved, both results agree.