Course Objectives
• Overview of worldwide applications and future perspectives of hard coatings.
• Fundamentals of vapour deposition techniques and surface treatments.
• Mechanical and spectroscopic characterization of hard coatings for tribological applications.

Course Description
The term hard coatings refers to the property of high hardness related to the resistance of a materials towards elastic and plastic deformation. Good tribological properties, such as wear resistance and low friction, are also required in many different applications. The mechanical properties of the hard materials depend on their composition, stoichiometry, structure, defects, and preferred orientation (texture). Most hard coatings are ceramic compounds such as oxides, carbides, nitrides, ceramic alloys, cermets, etc. New class of metastable nano-layered materials such as diamond, diamond-like carbon (DLC), cubic boron nitride, etc. are currently referred to as superhard materials. The properties of the surface layers can be controlled and tailored with the growth process.
This short course provides a general overview on the state-of-the-art of coating materials and thin-film architectures mainly suitable for tribological applications. A brief description of the techniques for their synthesis together with a short account of surface and interface engineering is also covered. Major emphasis is on the characterization of the coatings with a particular focus on the nanomechanical and nanotribological properties. In particular nanoindentation technique and scanning probe microscopy (SPM) are described and a few experimental results are presented.

Who Should Attend?
The course is valuable for those who are interested in the field of surface engineering both concerning the synthesis of novel hard materials and the methods for the characterization of their performance.

Dotes:
Basic preparation in material science

Instructor: Cristina Lenardi

Short curriculum
Cristina Lenardi graduated in 1985 in Physics at the University of Trieste (Italy) and received her Ph. D. for work on the synthesis and characterization on carbon nitride thin films. She worked at Sincrotrone Trieste (Italy) on the design and set-up of a beamline dedicated to surface and interface analysis. Afterwards she moved to the University of Milano in the group of Prof. P. Milani. From 2002 is researcher at the same University. She investigated mechanical and electronic properties of DLC, TiN/B or TiN/C films co-deposited with lubrificant phases, i.e. MoS2. Her actual research activity is mainly focused on in-situ analysis of cluster assembled nanostructured materials. She is author of more than forty papers on international scientific journals.

Course Materials
Copy of the slides. Reference list of relevant papers and books.

Questions?
- Cristina.Lenardi@mi.infn.it