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Effect of Pre-treatment and Duration of Pulse Plasma Nitriding on Duplex Plasma Treatment by Physical Vapor Deposition of TiN on AISI D2 Steel

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Abstract

Surface treatments have been vastly used in the manufacturing industry to improve the life of tool materials. Plasma nitriding (PN) is widely used because it allows controlling the surface microstructure mainly by the formation of a compound layer and N2 diffusion layer. Duplex surface treatments are new solutions for tools, combining the advantages of PN and physical vapor deposition (PVD) coatings by magnetron sputtering, looking for still better performance while at service. This investigation is an attempt to study the surface properties of AISI D2 steel with two different substrate conditions (as-received and heat-treated), tailored by duplex plasma treatment with a variation of PN duration (6, 12 and 24 h) followed by PVD of TiN coating. Surface properties and phase identification of the duplex-treated samples have been made by SEM and XRD. Other properties such as surface roughness, microhardness and wear resistance were evaluated by a surface profilometer, a Vickers microhardness tester and a ball-on-disk setup, respectively. The results indicated higher microhardness and wear resistance values for every heat-treated surface compared with the as-received samples. PN 6 h duplex treated had the highest microhardness and wear resistance properties among all. It is remarkable that the initial surface condition, N2 diffusion layer and compound layer play a decisive role in enhancing the load-carrying and wear resistance capability of duplex-treated samples.

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This manuscript has no associated data or the data will not be deposited. [Authors’ comment: All data have been obtained from the experiments and correlation, which are already in the article.]

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge late Dr. Nikhilesh Bandyopadhyay, Tata Steel Chair Professor, IIEST, Shibpur, for his involvement in the planning and organization of the work and Mr. Olli Orell, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Materials Science and Environmental Engineering at Tampere University for his contribution to the wear test. The authors also acknowledge the Board of Research in Fusion Science and Technology (BRFST) for its support of the project in the scheme of the National Fusion Programme (NFP) set up by the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), Gandhinagar-382044, Gujarat, India.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Metallurgy and Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, Howrah, 711103, India

    Kalyan Das, Abhishek Ghosh & Manojit Ghosh

  2. Facilitation Center for Industrial Plasma Technologies, Institute for Plasma Research, B-15-17/P, Sector 25, GIDC Electronic Estate, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, 382044, India

    Alphonsa Joseph, Ramkrishna Rane & Subroto Mukherjee

  3. Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Materials Science and Environmental Engineering, Tampere University, Kalevantie 4, 33100, Tampere, Finland

    Gourab Saha

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Contributions

KD was involved in conceptualization, experiments and writing of original draft; AJ guided the entire experiments; AG helped in the characterization methodology; GS performed the wear test; RR helped in PVD; SM was involved in administration and validated the work; MG was involved in supervision, review, editing and administration. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Das, K., Joseph, A., Ghosh, A. et al. Effect of Pre-treatment and Duration of Pulse Plasma Nitriding on Duplex Plasma Treatment by Physical Vapor Deposition of TiN on AISI D2 Steel. J. of Materi Eng and Perform 32, 9370–9382 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11665-022-07776-3

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