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Ceramic-metallic MAX phase of chromium aluminium carbide ternary compounds was successfully obtained through deposition by DC sputtering onto Si substrates. A study of the influence of substrate temperature and in-air post-annealing on the film crystallinity and oxidation was undertaken. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), wavelength-dispersive X-ray analysis (WDSX), and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were used for film characterization. It is shown that, at substrate temperature of about 450 ℃, as-deposited films are amorphous with small nanocrystals. Subsequent annealing in air at 700 ℃ leads to film crystallization and partial oxidation. WDSX spectroscopy shows that the films oxidise to a depth of around 120 nm, or 5% of total film thickness which amounts at around 2.68 µm. As a novelty, this demonstrates the possibility of in-air crystallization of Cr2AlC films without significant oxidation. Materials Analysis Using Diffraction (MAUD) software package for a full-profile analysis of the XRD patterns (Rietveld-type) was used to determine that, as a result of annealing, the average crystallite size changes from 7 to 34 nm, while microstrain decreases from 0.79% to 0.24%. A slight tendency of preferential growth along the (101¯0) direction has been observed. Such texturing of the microstructure has the potential of inducing beneficial anisotropic fracture behaviour in the coatings, potentially interesting for several industrial applications in load-bearing devices.


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Incipient low-temperature formation of MAX phase in Cr–Al–C films

Show Author's information O. CRISAN( )A. D. CRISAN
National Institute for Materials Physics, PO Box MG-7, 077125 Bucharest, Magurele, Romania

Abstract

Ceramic-metallic MAX phase of chromium aluminium carbide ternary compounds was successfully obtained through deposition by DC sputtering onto Si substrates. A study of the influence of substrate temperature and in-air post-annealing on the film crystallinity and oxidation was undertaken. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), wavelength-dispersive X-ray analysis (WDSX), and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were used for film characterization. It is shown that, at substrate temperature of about 450 ℃, as-deposited films are amorphous with small nanocrystals. Subsequent annealing in air at 700 ℃ leads to film crystallization and partial oxidation. WDSX spectroscopy shows that the films oxidise to a depth of around 120 nm, or 5% of total film thickness which amounts at around 2.68 µm. As a novelty, this demonstrates the possibility of in-air crystallization of Cr2AlC films without significant oxidation. Materials Analysis Using Diffraction (MAUD) software package for a full-profile analysis of the XRD patterns (Rietveld-type) was used to determine that, as a result of annealing, the average crystallite size changes from 7 to 34 nm, while microstrain decreases from 0.79% to 0.24%. A slight tendency of preferential growth along the (101¯0) direction has been observed. Such texturing of the microstructure has the potential of inducing beneficial anisotropic fracture behaviour in the coatings, potentially interesting for several industrial applications in load-bearing devices.

Keywords: X-ray diffraction (XRD), annealing, crystallization, ternary carbides, DC sputtering, wavelength-dispersive X-ray analysis (WDSX)

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Publication history
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Publication history

Received: 21 November 2017
Revised: 22 February 2018
Accepted: 03 March 2018
Published: 28 March 2018
Issue date: June 2018

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© The author(s) 2018

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Open Access The articles published in this journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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