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W. Seidl, S.A. Glatz, S. Kolozsvári, M. Arndt, P.H. Mayrhofer:
"Stress-Design in Multilayer Coatings - Architectural concepts and resulting properties";
Talk: AVS 62nd International Symposium & Exhibition, San Jose, USA; 2015-10-18 - 2015-10-23; in: "Technical and Exhibitor Program", (2015), 5.

Residual stresses within physical vapour deposited coatings are a major concern, as they are often the origin of failure and delamination. Furthermore, stresses, which typically scale with the thickness, limit the thickness of the coating. With increasing stresses, the interface region is increasingly stressed and weakened, promoting delamination and buckling effects. CrN coatings are known to allow for moderate compressive or even tensile stresses, enabling the preparation of coating thicknesses above 20 μm. Although CrN coatings exhibit excellent tribological and wear resistance properties, their thermal stability with respect to Cr-N dissociation is limited to 900 °C, which limits their application field. However, several applications require higher thermal stability in combination with relatively thick ceramic coatings. Therefore, we study in detail the requirements to develop nitride-based coatings with thicknesses exceeding 20 μm.
The residual stresses of arc evaporated TiN, CrN, TiAlN, CrAlN, and TiAlTaN coatings, prepared with an industrial sized coating plant (Balzers Oerlikon INNOVA), are investigated as a function of their thicknesses by measuring the curvature of one-side coated Si(100) cantilevers. Based on these studies we developed multilayer arrangements of TiN/CrN, TiAlN/CrN, TiAlN/CrAlN, and TiAlTaN/CrAlN thick coatings. Their stresses are designed through variations in bilayer period and arrangements of the cathodes at the sidewalls of the industrial chamber.
The individual coatings and multilayers are additionally investigated with respect to growth morphology (by cross sectional scanning electron microscopy), hardness and indentation moduli (by nanoindentation), structure and crystallographic phases (by X-ray diffraction).

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_242121.pdf