A method and chemical composition and material structure for improving fretting wear in substrates, particularly carbon-carbon composite (CCC). The invention relates to trilayer coatings, comprising a base of hard ZrO2, a middle layer of Al2O3, and a top layer of lubricious ZnO. The coatings of the present invention exhibit conformality and pore-filling down to approximately 100 microns into a carbon-carbon composite to which they are applied. The methods for preparing the coatings include a chemical vapor infiltration route, such as an atomic layer deposition (ALD) process, to uniformly and conformally coat the porous and open structure of CCC with a solid lubricant trilayer of ZnO/Al2O3/ZrO2 that results in significant improvement (65%) in fretting wear.