"tin Coatings for Wear Resistance and Gold-like Decorative Coatings"

Titanium Nitride (TiN) coatings have led the way for providing increased wear resistance and extended life of cutting tools, whether carbide inserts or high-speed steel. Where the earliest applications were for high temperature substrate materials (carbides) and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) was the process of choice, later developments in the physical vapor deposition (PVD) technology, especially in sputtering and cathodic arc deposition, made it possible to achieve similar improvements in performance for high speed steels and other heat sensitive metal substrates. Whereas the CVD process requires temperatures of about 1000°C to apply TiN, the PVD processes can apply the coating at temperatures of 5OO0C down to only 200°C, depending on the process chosen, and the application. As the deposition temperatures have decreased and the deposition rates have increased, the possible applications for TiN (and other hard coating materials) have expanded greatly.