Microstructures and wear properties of TiN-based cermet coating deposited on 1Cr18Ni9Ti stainless steel by electrospark process

A simple and effective surface treatment technique, electrospark deposition (ESD), has been successfully applied to deposit TiN-based cermet coating on stainless steel substrate. The nitrided coating had an average thickness of about 30 μm and formed metallurgical bonding with the substrate. The microstructure of the coating was mainly composed of TiN phase and ferrite (α-FeCr) phase. Its microhardness reached 889HV. The experimental results demonstrated that the nitrided coating had an excellent sliding wear resistance because the hard TiN phase distributed in the coating increased the resistance to micro-cutting and plowing during the sliding wear test, which effectively improves the surface performance of stainless steel substrate.