Galvanostatic methods for stripping of crn coatings

The improvement of the corrosion, wear and tribological behaviour by searching for new materials has entailed a greater expansion of PVD technology. Introduction of PVD systems in the industry is a real fact because this technique has been able to develop coatings whose response for many applications goes beyond used them until now. However the evolution of this technology requires minimize the economic costs in order to be a competitive process. A way to achieve this objective consists on recover the tool when the life time of the coating has finished or when deposition process has failed. Bringing this idea in the industry requires the stripping methods’ development due to surface’s tool must be clean —without coating’s remainders—, before a new deposition process. Current work shows galvanostatic stripping of chromium nitride coating deposited by two different PVD techniques: cathodic arc and magnetron sputtering. The electrochemical method has exhibited more advantages than chemical methods reported in literature, such a high sensitivity to detect final point of CrN coating stripping, capability to determinate structure of the coating —number of coatings, chemical composition, thickness…—, short times of the process and minimum damage on the substrate. These entire characteristics do possible think about a new deposition process on the stripped tool.