ABRASIVE WEAR-RESISTANCE OF TIN NBN MULTILAYERS - MEASUREMENT AND NEURAL-NETWORK MODELING/

A recently developed micro-scale abrasion test which measures the wear resistance of surface regions of a material involves rotating a hard sphere against the specimen in a slurry of abrasive particles. The met hod can be applied to curved as well as plane surfaces of practical co mponents. The wear resistance has been determined of a series of mono- and multi-layer PVD coatings (2-8 mu m thick) of TiN and NbN, which h ave also been characterised by micro-hardness tests and X-ray diffract ion. The influence on wear resistance and hardness of interlayer thick ness, interlayer mixing, deposition pressure, bias and the relative pr oportion of the two phases has been analysed by neural network modelli ng.