stainless steel surface

A continuous and compact zirconium alloying layer was prepared on 0Cr18Ni9Ti stainless steel by double-glow plasma surface alloying technology. The microhardness and the electrochemical corrosion experiments were carried out for the stainless steel and Zr-alloyed layer, respectively. The results show that the microhardness of Zr-alloyed layer is about 1530 HV0.05, which is obviously higher than that of the microhardness of stainless steel (about 350 HV0.05), and the microhardness of Zr-alloyed layer decreases gradually from the surface to the inside. The relative corrosion rates of the stainless steel are 2.18, 9.73 and 2.44 times as those of Zr-alloyed layers in 0.5 mol·L-1 H2SO4 solution, 0.5 mol·L-1 solution and 3.5% NaCl solution, respectively. The surface of unprocessed stainless steels are corroded seriously, but the surface of Zr-alloyed layers only exist slight localized corrosion, which indicates that corrosion resistance of 0Cr18Ni9Ti stainless steel with Zr-alloyed layer can be improved.