Magnetron Sputtering of Transition Metal Nitride Thin Films for Environmental Remediation

The current economic and ecological situation encourages the use of steel to push the technological limits and offer more cost-effective products. The enhancement of steel properties like wear, corrosion, and oxidation resistance is achieved by the addition of small amounts of chemical elements such as Cr, Ni, Si, N, etc. The steel surface can be protected by different treatments such as heating and coating, among others. For many decades, coatings have been an effective solution to protect materials using thin hard films. Several technologies for thin film deposition have been developed. However, some of them are restricted to certain fields because of their complex operating conditions. In addition, some deposition techniques cannot be applied to a large substrate surface type. The magnetron sputtering deposition process is a good option to overcome these challenges and can be used with different substrates of varying sizes with specific growth modes and for a wide range of applications. In this review article, we present the sputtering mechanism and film growth modes and focus on the mechanical and tribological behavior of nitride thin films deposited by the magnetron sputtering technique as a function of process conditions, particularly bias voltage and nitrogen percentage. The biomedical properties of transition metal nitride coatings are also presented.