The influence of compressive stress applied by hard coatings on the power loss of grain oriented electrical steel sheet

To reduce the core loss of electrical steel the vacuum arc ion plating technique has been used to deposit titanium nitride (TiN) layers on highly grain oriented electrical steel sheets. The layer thickness, the stresses of layers and coated sheets and the achieved reduction in core losses have been measured as functions of coating duration and applied bias voltage. Well adhered layers with high compressive stress up to 6.8 GPa have been produced. With increasing bias voltage the layer thickness decreases and the intrinsic stress of the layers increase. A further increase of bias voltage leads to a drop in stress due to thermal relaxation. In general, the tensile stress of the coated sheets rises with increasing layer thickness while the core loss of the coated material decreases with increasing tensile stress of the steel sheet and increasing bias voltage. The highest reduction of core loss has been found to be 28% (from P_1.7=0.86 W/kg for commercially coated HGO electrical steel sheet with glass film to 0.62 W/kg for TiN coated material) and is due to the reduction of excess loss only.