Mechanical and electrochemical characterization of vanadium nitride (VN) thin films

Vanadium nitride (V-N) thin films were grown using a reactive d.c. magnetron sputtering process, from a vanadium target (99.999%) in an Ar/N₂ gas mixture at different deposition bias voltage. Films were deposited onto silicon (1 0 0) and RUS-3 steel substrates at 400 °C. Structural, compositional, mechanical and electrochemical characterizations were performed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), elastic forward analysis (EFA), nanoindentation, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), and Tafel polarization curves, respectively. X-ray diffraction patterns show the presence of (1 1 1) and (2 0 0) crystallographic orientations associated to the V-N cubic phase. Nanoindentation measurements revealed that when the bias voltage increases from 0 V to −150 V the hardness and elastic modulus are increased from 11 GPa to 20 GPa and from 187 GPa to 221 GPa, respectively. EIS and Tafel curves showed that the corrosion rate of steel, coated with V-N single layer films deposited without bias voltage, diminishes 90% compared to the steel without this coating. On the other hand, when the V-N coating was deposited at the highest d.c. bias voltage (−150 V), the corrosion rate was greater than in the steel coated with zero-voltage (0 V) V-N films. This last result could be attributed to the formation of porosities produced by the ion bombardment during the deposition process.