Combined effect of Y2O3 nanoparticles and Si second-phase oxide on microstructure and wear resistance of plasma-clad steel coating

doi:10.1016/j.surfcoat.2020.126348

Surface and Coatings Technology

Volume 403, 15 December 2020, 126348

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.surfcoat.2020.126348 Get rights and content

Highlights

•
Y₂O₃ nanoparticle cooperated with alloyed Si decrease defect and slag of material.
•
Si-oxide provides bonding sites for Y after plasma-transferred arc process.
•
Y₂O₃ addition (<0.8 wt%) avoids third-body interaction of 17Cr2NiSiMo coating.
•
The coating modified with 0.4 wt% Y₂O₃ achieved best stable wear performance.

Abstract

Alloy steel 17Cr2NiSiMo coatings with small amounts (<1 wt%) of added Y₂O₃ nanoparticles are fabricated by plasma-transferred arc. The combined effect of the Y₂O₃ nanoparticles and Si-oxide second-phase particles on microstructure, sliding wear resistance, and wear weight loss of the alloy steel coating are investigated. The Y content in the spherical Si-oxide particles is found to increase with the addition of Y₂O₃ nanoparticles, as Si provides second-phase oxide particles for Y to accumulate in the coating material during the rapid cooling solidification. Thus, the Fe-based coating is refined and purified, resulting in a low defect or slag concentration. The wear mechanism of the modified coating transforms from third-body interaction and plastic deformation to slight peeling, as dendritic grains in the coating are transformed into equiaxed grains. The wear performance of the modified coating is obviously enhanced with the addition of 0.4 wt% Y₂O₃ nanoparticles, as indicated by the reduction of its wear weight loss to 20.55% and increase of its relative wear resistance to 25.87%.

Introduction

Plasma-transferred arc (PTA) has the advantage of producing a composite alloy layer with an enhanced wear resistance due to high quality and high stability of properties. Hence, PTA surface treatment technology has developed rapidly in the field of tribological applications in recent years [[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]]. Steel coatings obtained by PTA which are lower friction and higher wear resistance than cast iron [[7], [8], [9], [10]], thus considered as candidate of dry friction material for cylinder head, automotive and train braking systems. However, a large number of defect, dendritic, and columnar crystals are produced in the process of rapid heating and rapid solidification, leading to cracks and wear debris under dry friction condition, which result in micro-cutting and third-body interaction and decrease the wear performance [11,12]. Therefore, to reduce the formation of defect, dendritic and columnar crystal and to improve the performance of the cladding coating, some trace elements, such as Y [[13], [14], [15], [16], [17]], Ti [18,19], or Mo [[8], [9], [10]], are introduced into the cladding material as refiners.

It has been reported that Y plays an effective role in grain refinement for plasma-transferred arc alloy coating (PC). Y can refine the grains and purify the Fe-based phase of the alloy coating during the PTA process [[20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25]]. The addition of Y could decrease the melting range after segregation to the dendrite tips. As a result, the number of columnar grains is reduced and that of fibrous grains is increased when the dendrites dissociate into smaller dendrites and act as heterogeneous nuclei. Furthermore, due to the affinity to active oxygen and unmatched lattice, Y atoms can form stable compounds with other elements such as S, P, and O [26]. These stable compounds float upward from the melt and form slag on the surface of the PC, thus serving as purifying tissue [27]. However, due to rapid cooling solidification, a part of the slag contains Y that cannot escape from the grain boundary of the cladding material in time [22], leading to defect points, which decrease the wear resistance of the alloy coating [28]. Therefore, applications of plasma cladding need to be developed by designing coating material by the optimistic addition method, and a certain amount of Y is added so that the PC can successfully benefit from Y without adverse impact.

A small amount of Si is usually added to increase the wettability of Fe single bond Cr alloy coating by PTA. Alloyed Si of alloy powder forms spherical Si oxide particles in the coating during the PTA process under atmospheric conditions [29]. At the same time, these dispersed spherical particles increase the hardness and wear resistance of the coating [13]. Furthermore, the atomic radii of Y, Si, and Fe are 0.180, 0.146, and 0.172 nm, respectively, and Y can form substitutional solid solution with Si, which are relatively matched with those of Fe [14,15]. Therefore, Si oxide is a favorable candidate to provide second-phase particles for Y to accumulate in the coating material during the rapid cooling solidification. To this end, we investigated the optimistic addition of Y₂O₃ nanoparticles (YNPs) and the combined effect of YNPs and Si second-phase oxide on the microstructures and wear-resistant performances of Fe-based coatings, which were fabricated by PTA.

Section snippets

Materials

The PTA material was C0-20 alloy powder (Höganäs (Shanghai, China) Inc.) with a particle size of 80–120 μm. The morphology of alloy powder is shown in Fig. 1a. The powder consisted of Cr (16.04%), Ni (2.15%), Si (0.91%), Mo (0.42%), C (0.2%), O (0.12%), Cu (0.12%), Co (0.098%), P (≤0.01%), and Fe (balance) in mass percent. Before the manufacture, the powder was placed in a drying chamber at 80 °C for 2 h in order to reduce the influence of moisture.

Y₂O₃ nanoparticles (YNPs) were synthesized

Microstructure

Fig. 2 shows the cross-sectional morphology of the PC samples. The unmodified sample exhibited the weakest metallurgical bond formed between the coating and the substrate when some defects were present in the coating and interface of the bond, as shown in Fig. 2a. The modified sample with 0.4 wt% YNPs formed strong metallurgical bonds when fewer and smaller defects were present in the coating and interface of the bond, as shown in Fig. 2b. Large numbers of long columnar crystals were found in

Conclusions

The effects of the addition of small amounts of Y₂O₃ nanoparticles (≤1 wt%) and second-phase Si-oxide particles on 17Cr2NiSiMo alloy were investigated. According to the material design, Y can be found in the second phase of Si oxide after rapid cooling and solidification when the PC sample was fabricated with a low defect concentration and sufficiently strong metallurgical bond. Due to the refining and combined effect of Y with Si second-phase, the dendritic grains of the coatings are

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Junyu Yue: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software. Xiaoyu Liu: Investigation, Data curation, Formal analysis. Yi Sui: Visualization, Writing - original draft. Changsheng Liu: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition. Xiaohua Sun: Writing - review & editing. Weidong Chen: Validation, Supervision, Funding acquisition.

Declaration of competing interest

We declare that we have no financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that can inappropriately influence our work. There is no professional or other personal interest of any nature or kind in any product, service and/or company that could be construed as influencing the position presented in, or the review of, the manuscript entitled, “Combined effect of Y₂O₃ nanoparticles and Si second-phase oxide on microstructure and wear resistance of plasma-clad steel coating”.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 51964035], National Key Research and Development Program of China [grant numbers 2017YFB0305801], the Joint Funds of NSFC-Liaoning [grant numbers U1508213], and the Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region [grant numbers 2020LH05017].

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¹: Contributed equally to this work.

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Combined effect of Y2O3 nanoparticles and Si second-phase oxide on microstructure and wear resistance of plasma-clad steel coating

Highlights

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Materials

Microstructure

Conclusions

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Declaration of competing interest

Acknowledgments

Surf. Coat. Technol.

Surf. Coat. Technol.

Surf. Coat. Technol.

Wear

Mater. Charact.

Surf. Coat. Technol.

Surf. Coat. Technol.

Surf. Coat. Technol.

Surf. Coat. Technol.

Surf. Coat. Technol.

Colloids Surf. B: Biointerfaces

T. Nonferr Metal Soc.

J. Rare Earths

Mater. Des.

J. Mater. Process. Technol.

J. Rare Earths

J. Rare Earths

Combined effect of Y₂O₃ nanoparticles and Si second-phase oxide on microstructure and wear resistance of plasma-clad steel coating