Often, the enhanced hardness reported for nanostructured coatings is associated with high residual compressive stresses. In this work, we report on the hardness enhancement in TiN-Ni nanocomposite coatings wihtout increase of stress in the coatings. Nanocomposite coatings of nc-TiN/a-Ni were deposited using an ultrahigh vacuum dual ion beam sputtering system from a composite Ti-Ni target sputtered with 1,2 keV Ar⁺ ions and the growing film was bombarded during deposition with a mixture of 50 eV Ar⁺-N²⁺-N⁺ ions . The residual stress in the coatings was determined using XRD analysis and crystallite group method . The results are compared with the conventional sin²ψ and radius of curvature methods. For the films deposited at 300°C the progressive addition of Ni in TiN produced a decrease of coating residual stresses and for films deposited at RT they remain nearly constant. For both temperatures, the hardness increases and exhibits a maximum in the range 5 to 10 at% Ni.

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1. Microstructural characterization of TiN-Ni nanocomposite coatings deposited by reactive ion beam assisted deposition
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