Microstructures and Mechanical Properties of Nanostructured Copper-304 Stainless Steel Multilayers Synthesized by Magnetron Sputtering

Nanostructured Cu/304 stainless steel (SS) multilayers were prepared by magnetron sputtering at room temperature. 304SS has a face-centered cubic (fcc) structure in bulk. However, in the Cu/304SS multilayers, the SS layers exhibited fcc structure for layer thickness of less than or equal to 5 nm. For 304SS layer thickness larger than 5nm, bcc 304SS grains were observed to grow on top of the initial ≈ 5 nm of fcc SS. The maximum hardness of …