Characterization of the AISI 304 Alloy Treated in a Large Vacuum Chamber PIII System with a New HV Pulser

Plasma immersion ion implantation (PIII) method is often used to cleaning and enhancing mechanical properties of the surface of materials. In this work, the AISI 304 was treated in a PIII system to improve tribological and wear resistance properties. The new HV pulser was prepared to reach high average power (10 kW) using solid-state technology and a pulse transformer rather than using a conventional one based on hard-tube tetrodes with HV storage capacitors. For preliminary tests, low-density nitrogen plasma and pulses of 10 kV, 30μs width, and 1 kHz were used. A larger vacuum chamber used (600 liters) is very important for treating large area components and for batch processing. This is necessary in industrial applications and in cases that require high quality processing as in spatial or medical components. Stainless steel support was used to hold the samples in our case. XRD, SEM, and pin-on-disk surface diagnostics were used for investigation and characterization of the treated surfaces.