**2.1 Coating deposition**

Coatings were deposited through the filtered cathodic vacuum arc deposition (FCVAD) [5, 7, 25–29] technology. The experiments were carried out using a unit VIT-2, (IDTI RAS – MSTU STANKIN, Russia) with two arc evaporators with a pulsed magnetic field and one arc evaporator with filtering the vapor-ion flow. Furthermore, the complex also included a source of pulsed bias voltage supply to a substrate, a dynamic gas mixing system for reaction gases, a system to control automatically the chamber pressure and a process temperature control system, and a system for stepless adjustment of planetary gear rotation.

Two groups of samples were manufactured:

Group I included samples with three coatings of various compositions, i.e. I-a – Ti-TiN-(Ti,Cr,Al,Si)N coating; I-b – Zr-ZrN-(Nb,Zr,Cr,Al)N coating; I-c – Zr-ZrN- (Zr,Al,Si)N coating.

Group II included samples with the Ti-TiN-(Ti,Al,Cr)N coatings with different values of the nanolayer period λ, formed through varying the turntable rotation frequency n (see **Table 1**).
