Residual stress, Young''s modulus and fracture stress of hot flame deposited diamond

Chemical vapour deposition (CVD) diamond coatings deposited on various substrates usually contain residual stresses. Since the residual stress affects the adhesion of the coating to the substrate, as well as the performance of the coating/substrate composite in many technical applications it is of importance to study the magnitude of these stresses.

In the present study the hot flame method was used to deposit diamond coatings on cemented carbide inserts by scanning the surface with a nine flame nozzle. By varying the oxygen to acetylene flow ratio and the deposition time coatings of different qualities and thicknesses were obtained. The residual strain/stress of the coatings was measured by three different methods: X-ray diffraction using the sin² (Ψ) method, Raman spectroscopy and disc deflection measurements. To extract the residual stress from the strain data the Young's modulus was obtained from bending tests of diamond cantilever beams manufactured from free standing diamond films. The latter technique was also used to determine the fracture stress of the diamond films.

All deposited coatings displayed a residual compressive strain/stress state. The residual strain in the diamond coatings did not vary with coating thickness (1.5 μm to 20 μm) but was found to increase from −1.8 × 10⁻³ to −2.2 × 10⁻³ with decreasing diamond quality. The compressive residual stress was found to decrease from −2 GPa to −1.3 GPa with decreasing diamond quality. This is mainly due to a decrease in Young's modulus (from 1.1 TPa to 0.6 TPa) with decreasing diamond quality. Also the fracture stress was found to decrease (from 1.8 GPa to 0.8 GPa) with decreasing diamond quality. The three methods used for measuring the stress state in the coatings, X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy and deflection measurement, all give the same result. The deflection technique has the advantage that no information about the elastic properties of the coating is needed, whereas Raman spectroscopy has the best lateral resolution (≈5 μm) and is the fastest method (≈5 min).