Wear and Friction of Nitrogen Ion Implanted Steel

A pin on disk wear test apparatus was used to evaluate wear and friction properties for nitrogen ion implanted and non-ion implanted steel disks in the presence of a lubricant. Both AISI/1018 mild steel and 304 stainless steel were examined. Typical fluence levels for ion implantation were above 10¹⁷ ions/cm². In this paper disk wear is measured directly by a Talysurf profilometer tracing of the disk wear scar. By varying the contact area of the pin it was possible to evaluate wear behavior of both unimplanted and implanted disks over a wide range of contact pressures. It is shown that stainless steel disk wear can be decreased by nitrogen ion implantation, provided that contact pressures remain less than the yield strength of the substrate material. No significant wear improvements were observed for 1018 steel. To evaluate improvements in hardness due to nitrogen ion implantation, very low penetration depth microhardness measurements were made and the indentation diagonals were measured in a scanning electron microscope. These results and their limitations are also presented.