ADHESION PROPERTIES OF DLC AND TiO2 THIN FILMS USING SCRATCH TEST METHODS

One of the important parameters of thin films made on various types of basic substrates is adhesion of these films to basic material. In this article, we focused on the study of the actual problem of adhesion of diamond-like-carbon films (DLC) and adhesion of titanium dioxide (TiO2). The used deposition technique was Pulsed laser deposition (PLD) and the basic substrates were silicon wafers Si(111). We prepared testing samples of DLC with various deposition energies. The thicknesses of these tested films were several tens of nanometres. The TiO2 testing samples were prepared with various deposition conditions and thicknesses in range of 60 divided by 130 nanometres. On these samples we tested adhesion properties by various techniques based on scratch tests on various instruments in several different laboratory departments in the Czech Republic. For the individual instruments we observed and compared abilities of these systems to evaluate adhesion of thin films with thickness of 100 nanometres and less. For evaluation we used Czech, International and USA standards for ceramic and metallic materials.