Failure assessment of a hard brittle coating on a ductile substrate subjected to cyclic contact loading

Hard brittle films and coatings are often employed as a protective coating for metallic ductile substrates. In use, such coatings are generally subjected to cyclic/repeated contact loading and sliding over long periods of time. This study investigated the monotonic and cyclic contact fracture mechanism of hard coatings on ductile substrates (an electroplated Ni-P coating on a stainless steel substrate, SUS304) in order to evaluate their mechanical durability. In the experiment, both monotonic and cyclic indentation tests using a ball indenter with large contact force were performed. The fracture nucleation process was identified using the acoustic emission method. For monotonic contact loading (single indentation), coating cracks are produced by the excessive plastic deformation of the substrate, itself caused by contact loading, which makes the bending curvature of a coating a critical moment. Subsequently, cyclic contact loading (cyclic indentation) was applied to the coating in order to investigate the cycle number of film cracking. It was found that the critical contact force for coating fracture decreases, compared with that of monotonic loading. This critical force is dependent on the number of loading cycles. This may be due to the fact that cyclic contact loading encourages large plastic deformation of the SUS304 substrate owing to cyclic plasticity. Therefore, the cyclic plastic deformation behavior of the substrate was investigated using cyclic microindentation tests and the finite element method. In the computation, the Chaboche model was employed to compute the cyclic plastic deformation of the substrate, since it simulates cyclic plasticity. We clarified the cyclic contact fracture mechanism of electroplated Ni-P coating on an SUS304 substrate. Based on this, we finally predicted the coating lifetime (i.e., mechanical durability) under cyclic contact loading. Therefore, the present study is useful for obtaining information about film/coating fracture properties under both monotonic and cyclic contact loadings. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.