High Temperature Friction and Wear Performance of PVD Coatings under Press Hardening Contact Conditions

Press hardening is widely employed to produce automotive structural and safety components from advanced high-strength steels. This process depends on friction between the forming tools and the work piece. Wear of the forming tools affects the dimensional accuracy of produced components and reduces their service life. It is therefore desirable to reduce wear of forming tools for press hardening applications. One way to achieve this is by applying hard physical vapour deposited (PVD) coatings on the tool. In this work, the tribological behaviour of PVD coated tool-work piece material pairs has been studied at elevated temperatures in an experimental set-up simulating the tribological conditions in press hardening. Four different PVD coatings deposited on tool steel and uncoated tools as reference were studied during sliding against uncoated and Al-Si coated 22MnB5 steel. Results show that uncoated tools exhibited the lowest coefficient of friction when sliding against uncoated 22MnB5 steel. A CrWN coating initially showed low coefficient of friction but it increased with increasing sliding distance. A TiAlN coating and one of two AlCrN coatings showed similar frictional behaviour when sliding against uncoated 22MnB5 steel. During sliding against uncoated 22MnB5 steel, adhesive wear has been found to be the dominant wear mechanism. Adhesive wear was considerably reduced in the case of hard PVD coated tools in comparison to that of uncoated tools. During sliding against Al-Si coated 22MnB5 steel, no clear advantage in terms of friction behaviour of uncoated or PVD coated tools was observed. However, the transfer of Al-Si coating material from the work piece to the tools was significantly reduced for PVD coated tools. Frictional instabilities in all cases involving Al-Si coated work piece material further confirmed the occurrence of adhesive material transfer.