**1. Introduction**

Through constant development within the metalworking industry, current processes consist of designing and producing new structures at a higher speed, cheaper with more efficient processes that present a low rate of wear on the equipment and devices used during said processes. Therefore, hard wear-resistant coatings have been incorporated as protective coatings on cutting tools in recent decades with the purpose of giving a longer useful life to this type of device, which suffers from high wear during the machining processes [1–3]. This type of coatings currently has a wide range of investigations, which have been able to generate different configurations such as binary, ternary or quaternary systems, single or multilayer systems, as well as a great combination of different elements that have conferred characteristics. Special to this type of coatings, such as high hardness, high biocompatibility, high resistance to wear, high resistance to corrosion, among other specific characteristics required depending on their use and application. A specific type of coatings such as those based on nitrides, which have generated great interest within various and novel coating systems, these coatings were implemented approximately since 1970 [4], being one of the first anti-wear coatings used in the industry. This type of coatings have great hardness, high resistance to wear and high resistance to

corrosion among other interesting properties, such as TiN [4], TiCrN [5], [Al2O3/ Si3N4] [6], TiCN [7], BCN [8] among other configurations.

Nitride-based coatings are constituted by the incorporation of nitrogen atoms (N) within the crystalline structure of transition metals such as Ti, Al, Cr, V among others, which generates a distortion within their structure, causing internal stresses, with changing specific properties of the material. In addition, the inclusion of N atoms interstitially within the structures generates a physicochemical change in the material, giving it changes in its behavior based on a new metal-ceramic structure that it now presents. Therefore, properties such as hardness and corrosion resistance increase considerably in relation to simpler coatings based on transition metals. On the other hand, the distortion within their structures due to the inclusion of N atoms generating stresses within their structure as mentioned above, causes physical changes in the coating, such as an increase in the density of these coatings, which influences characteristics. Surface surfaces such as roughness and the presence of these residual stresses within the structure, causes an increase in the mechanical properties of the coating, among other changes in material properties.
