Multielemental alloying of steel surface layer under the action of compression plasma flows

Abstract

The microstructure, phase and element composition, microhardness of the carbon steel surface layer simultaneously alloyed with molybdenum and chromium atoms under the impact of compression plasma flows were investigated in this work. X-ray diffraction analysis, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersion microanalysis and microhardness measurements were used for the investigation of the alloyed layer structure and properties. The findings showed that an increase of the plasma pulses number led to a decrease of the molybdenum and chromium atoms concentration in the alloyed layer as well as to the growth of alloying elements distribution homogeneity. The alloyed layer contained solid solutions on the basis of α-Fe and γ-Fe according to the data of the phase composition analysis. Plasma impact resulted in 3.5 times microhardness increase due to structure refinement.