| Description |
The tendency of titanium (Ti) and its alloys to wear, gall and seize during high contact stresses between sliding surfaces severely limits their applications in bearings, gears etc. One way to mitigate these problems is to modify their surfaces by applying hard and wear resistant surface coatings. Boriding, which involves solid state diffusion of boron (B) into Ti, thereby forming hard surface layers consisting of TiB2 and TiB compounds has been shown to produce extremely high wear resistant surfaces in Ti and its alloys. The growth kinetics of these layers are, however, limited by the low diffusivities of B in the high melting TiB2 and TiB compounds. On the basis of the fact that HCP metals such as Ti show enhanced (anomalous) self-diffusion near the phase transition temperature, the first hypothesis of this work has been that the diffusivity enhancement should cause rapid ingress of B atoms, thereby accelerating the growth of the hard boride layers. Isothermal boriding experiments were performed close to phase transition temperature (890, 910, and 915°C) for time periods ranging from 3 to 24 hours. It was found that indeed a much deeper growth of TiB into the Ti substrate (~75 ?m) occurred at temperatures very close to the transition temperature (910°C), compared to that obtained at 1050°C. A diffusion model based on error-function solutions of Fick's second law was developed to quantitatively illustrate the combined effects of the normal B diffusion in the TiB phase and the anomalous B diffusion in Ti phase in accelerating TiB layer growth. Furthermore, isothermal boriding experiments close to transition temperature (900°C) for a period of 71 hours resulted in coating thickness well above 100 ?m, while at 1050°C, the layer growth saturated after about 24 hours of treatment time. In the second part of this work, a novel approach named "cyclic-phase-changediffusion, (CPCD)," to create deeper TiB2 and TiB coating layers on CP-Ti by cyclic thermal processing, has been investigated. It was found that thermal cyclic B diffusion in Ti across the alpha(?)-beta(?) phase transition temperature led to highly hardened surface layers enriched with TiB whiskers that grow to depths exceeding 120 ?m. By solving the transient heat transport problem for cyclic changes in surface temperatures, it was found that there is a "heat-packet" that travels back and forth from the surface to the interior of the material. This heat-packet appears to transport B dissolved in ?-Ti into interior causing increased coating depths. |
