Increasing the wear resistance of machine parts by nitriding with complex surface preparation

Abstract

At the moment, the active development of new technologies often involves the operation of machines and mechanisms at increased loads. This, in turn, can lead to an intensification of the wear process of parts and, subsequently, to a loss of stability in the operation of structures as a whole. The search for ways to increase the resistance of surfaces to wear is currently the most relevant area of materials science. Parts that experience significant surface stresses are subjected to surface hardening to increase fatigue resistance. Among the applied methods of surface hardening are mechanical, thermal, chemical-thermal, laser hardening, ion implantation and others. The wearing process is accompanied by changes in the state of the material of the surface layer, the properties of which are formed during the manufacturing stage. An increase in the homogeneity of the properties of the hardened material of the surface layer leads to an increase in the wear resistance of the part. An important stage in the finishing of the part is the preparation of the surface for hardening processing. The use of the method of ion entrainment of material from the surface of the workpiece for its polishing provides a high degree of homogeneity of the material surface, increases the efficiency of subsequent activation of the surface by ion implantation and provides a uniform nitrided layer, which makes it possible to increase the wear resistance of the part by approximately three times compared to traditional nitriding. In this work, we consider the effect of preliminary treatment of samples by dry electropolishing on the wear resistance of samples from a number of industrially applied steels. It is shown that a decrease in the degree of roughness can increase the wear resistance of samples by several times.