Nanostructured protective coatings for harsh environments

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Progress in protective coatings (PC) presents important challenges and opportunities that significantly impact sustainable development and the economic and environmental benefits in many industrial sectors, including aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, mining, biomedical, pharmaceutical, energy, and others. These aspects have strongly stimulated research on PC with enhanced mechanical, tribological and corrosion properties frequently combined with other functional characteristics such as controlled thermal and electrical conductivities, low sticking and others. Despite the progress in the development of the fabrication processes and materials for PC, the acceptance and further advances in this area are frequently limited by insufficient stability and durability at high temperatures and in oxidative environments, by high residual stresses in the PC systems, and adhesion to the underlying substrate. In addition, the detailed mechanisms of the coatings system failure under specific, application-related external solicitations such as tribolo-mechanical loading under hostile environmental conditions are not sufficiently understood. In response to the important needs in the field of thin protective, functional and multifunctional coating systems described above, the proposed research program will focus on developing a new class of coating architectures with embedded Thin Film Metallic Glasses (TFMG, also called amorphic metals or glassy metals). Specifically, the TFMG possess an amorphous, glass-like structure, hence they contain no grain boundaries giving rise to high corrosion, oxidation, and wear resistance compared to the polycrystalline structures. They also combine high strength and high toughness, low coefficient of friction, high hardness, low surface energy, and are very smooth. In this context, the proposed program will advance research on PC while specifically focusing on the following aspects: 1. Design and fabrication of new and novel TFMG coatings using low pressure, pulsed plasma processes (PPP) including High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering (HiPIMS) with synchronized target-substrates interactions; 2. Assessment and optimization of the mechanical, tribological, corrosion and tribo-corrosion characteristics as well as of the thermal stability of the TFMG coatings individually, and 3. Performance of complex multilayer hard coating systems with embedded TFMG sublayers. The main impact of the proposed research is based on the following attributes: a) it will contribute detailed understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the formation of TFMG coatings; b) It will help to explain their exceptional mechanical and protective performance; c) It will lead to significant improvement of the tribo-mechanical performance of protective coatings and open new areas of applications of particular interest of the Canadian economy.