Effect of the substrate temperature in ZrN coatings grown by the pulsed arc technique studied by XRD

ZrN films were grown by a plasma-assisted repetitive pulsed vacuum arc discharge. The films were grown on 304 stainless steel substrates. To grow the coatings, a cathode of Zr was used. The system is made up by a reaction chamber with two electrodes placed face to face. A pulsed power supply is used to generate the discharge. The coatings were grown, varying the substrate temperature (Ts) between 50 °C and 260 °C. The pressure into the chamber was 3 mbar and the voltage of the discharge was 270 V. XRD technique was employed to study the coatings, observing variations of some parameters as crystallographic texture and crystallite size, as a function of Ts. Morphological characteristics were analyzed by means of an atomic force microscopy (AFM), determining the thickness and the grain size, where it is possible to observe the influence of the surface and strain energies which have great relationship with Ts.