Performance Test of Diamond-Like Carbon Films for Lubricating ITER Blanket Maintenance Equipment under GPa-Level High Contact Stress

Abstract

Diamond-like carbon (DLC) coating was tested as a candidate solid lubricant for transmission gears of the maintenance equipment of the blanket of the ITER instead of an oil lubricant. The wear tests using the pin-on-disk method were performed on disks with SCM440 and SNCM420 as the base materials and coated with soft, layered, and hard DLCs. All cases satisfied the required allowable contact stress (2 GPa) and lifetime (10⁴ cycles), and therefore the feasibility of the DLC coating was validated. Among the three types of DLCs, the soft DLC showed the best performance.