Coatings on TiN and Ti(C,N) basis for biomedical application to blood contact and TiN/CrN multilayered tribological systems produced by pulsed laser deposition

Research activity on surface en g ineering performed at the IMIM PAS in last years has been presented. Experiments were focused on TiN and Ti(C,N) thin coatings produced on titanium and biologically applied polyurethane substrates by application of pulsed laser deposition (PLD), magnetron sputtering (MS), and hybrid PLD/MS, at room temperature. Bio-physical tests of the kinetics of shear flow-induced cell detachment have been carried out. Model eucariotic cells easy to manipulate using technics of molecular biology have been used in experiments. Fluorescence patterns obtained after the performed test at kinetics condition tests have been used to establish kinetics curves. A microstructure examination by application of XRD and transmission electron microscopy have been performed. On the basis of the real cell detachment experiment, a finite element simulation was done. The highest shear stress was estimated for the region of the radius of the whole pierced in the center of the upper disc. There are an increasing number of applications in tribology where the properties of a sin gle material are not sufficient. One way to surmount this problem is to use a multilayer coating. Application of metallic interlayers improves adhesion of nitride hard layer in multilayer systems. Tribological coatings consisted of 4, 8 and 32 layers of Cr/CrN and Ti/TiN types were fabricated with the PLD technique. It is found in transmission electron examinations on thin foils prepared from cross-section that both nitride-based multilayer structures studied are characterized by small columnar crystallite sizes and high defect density, what might raise their hardness but compromise coating adhesion. The intermediate metallic layers contained larger sized and less defective columnar structure compared to the nitride layers located at close to the substrate which should improve the coatings toughness. Switching from single layer to multi-layer metal/nitride composition improved resistance to delamination.