Stress and texture analysis of zirconia coatings by XRD total pattern fitting

Calcia stabilized zirconia films on silicon substrates were made by magnetron sputtering using different deposition parameters. The relationships between the micromechanical properties of the coatings and the deposition process were studied employing a new x-ray diffraction procedure. The proposed method analyzes simultaneously the residual stress state and the texture of the films in a unified way using wide range of x-ray data collected at different tiltings of the sample. The method takes advantage of a micromechanical model to obtain the residual stress field and the effective elastic modulus from the experimental data. The microstructure of the coatings is incorporated on the model and the harmonic approximation is used to describe the texture of the samples. The results obtained by this new procedure are compared with the traditional methods as the curvature analysis for the residual stresses and the pole figures analysis for the texture.