Tribological properties of diamond-like carbon films with surface nano-structure formed by femtosecond laser pulses

Abstract

We report tribological properties of diamond-like carbon (DLC) film of which surface has been nanostructured with femtosecond (fs) laser pulses. For this study, the fs-laser processing technology has been developed to produce a uniformly nanostructured DLC surface over a wide area of 15 x 15 mm2. The results have demonstrated that the DLC surface has an excellent frictional performance by coating a MoS2 layer on the nanostructured surface, where the friction coefficient of DLC surface was observed to decrease down to 0.07 from 0.18 for the steel ball and to 0.02 - 0.04 from 0.08 for the WC-Co ball used in the friction test machine.