As engineering equipment is applied in a harsh environment with a heavy load, cyclic stress, and a wide range of temperatures, the reliability of the equipment becomes a challenge, especially when wear contact is involved. Hence, the design and exploitation of an advanced alloy surface may hold the key to control and minimize friction and wear in the transmission system for safety-critical applications. High entropy alloys (HEAs) or multi-component alloys have been proved to have outstanding mechanical properties, corrosion resistance, and high-temperature oxidation resistance with potential use as wear resistance and friction reduction coatings. In this paper, the properties and development status of HEAs coating systems for tribological applications were reviewed to gain a better understanding of their advantages and limitations obtained by different preparation methods. Specifically, focus was paid to magnetron sputtering, laser cladding, and thermal spraying since these three deposition methods were more widely used in wear-resistant and friction-reducing coatings. Building upon this, the correlation between composition, mechanical properties, and friction as well as wear characteristics of these coatings are summarized. Finally, the key problems to be solved to move the field forward and the future trend of tribology application for HEA coatings are outlined.

Understanding the fundamental behaviors of tribocorrosion for metals is critical for their possible application in seawater. For the recently emerging medium entropy alloys (MEAs), while mechanical wear and corrosion phenomena have been established, such experimental exploration is still lacking regarding the tribocorrosion behavior. In this work, the tribocorrosion behavior of CoCrNi MEA was investigated on a reciprocating sliding friction testing machine. Although a significant increase of current density formed due to sliding, CoCrNi exhibits superior passivity when compared with 316L and Inconel 600. In addition, the total tribocorrosion volume loss increases with positive shifting of the applied potential for CoCrNi. Specifically, the total material loss at an applied potential more positive than the pitting potential is one order in magnitude larger than that under pure mechanical wear, confirming the synergy between wear and corrosion. The generated pits on the worn surface became the preferred locations of wear and tear, leading to accelerated materials’ loss rate. Through detecting the morphologies of the contact surfaces, the features of abrasive wear, adhesive wear, delamination, and plastic deformation were revealed for CoCrNi during tribocorrosion at different potentials.