IMPROVEMENT OF THE CONTACT RIVETS DURABILITY OF SHIPS’ ELECTRICAL APPARATUS BY USE OF MULTILAYER TITANIUM NITRIDE COATINGS

Requirements to the materials for electrical contacts are increased due to high loads and high operating temperatures. Often conventional single-layer coatings of electrical contacts can not meet these requirements. Using multilayer coatings allows the requirements to the contacts to be complied and also to control structure (internal stresses and elastic behavior of the material), and therefore to control the properties of coatings. Particularly hard, wearing and corrosion resistant are coatings of titanium nitride TiN type.

By simultaneous and coherent operation of two types of plasmatrons – Electric Arc Plasmatron (ARC) and magnetron (MS - Magnetron Sputtering) we have experimented the following three types of coatings on electrical contacts of contactor K6E: Monolayer coating of titanium Ti; Double layer coating of titanium - titanium nitride, Ti/TiN; Triple layer coating of titanium-titanium nitride-titanium Ti/TiN/Ti. Coating is done in combination of the following factors: thickness of the coating and composition of the gas environment in the vacuum chamber, in which they are implemented and tested 10 different modes of coating. It has been observed that modification of the interface by the formation of the surface layer can lead to increase of the electrical contact durability