Wear resistance of diffusion annealed borided AISI 1018 steel

•New results indicate that diffusion annealing doubled borided 1018 steel wear rate.•Fracture toughness of borided 1018 steel is higher after diffusion annealing.•Diffusion annealing increments the plasticity index of borided 1018 steel.•Diffusion annealing generates surface compressive stresses on borided 1018 steel. Boriding improves the mechanical and chemical properties of steels. However, the discontinuity of mechanical properties at the FeB-Fe2B interphase can induce shear failure. As a solution, post-boriding treatments to dissolve the FeB layer are applied. In this study, new results on the wear behavior of AISI 1018 steel exposed to powder-pack boriding process (PPBP) and to the diffusion annealing process (DAP), which were evaluated through ball-on-flat linear reciprocating wear tests under different sliding distances are presented. Vickers microhardness characterization was also performed. After DAP a change from tensile to compressive residual stresses at the surface of the material was found, as well as a two-fold increase in wear and fracture resistance. Failure mechanisms on the surface of the wear tracks, for both treatment conditions, were mainly grooving and adhered material as observed by scanning electron microscopy.