Simulation of boronizing kinetics of AISI 316 steel with an integral diffusion model

Boriding or boronizing is a type of surface property improvement process applied to metal or some non-metal materials by diffusion. The calculation of diffusion kinetics is also very important as it is a diffusion controlled process. Today, many researchers perform kinetic calculations by applying the Second Fick's law to the Arrhenius equation. In this study, as an alternative to conventional kinetic calculations, the mathematical modeling of diffusion kinetics has been performed using the integral diffusion model. For the boronizing experiments, the pack-boronizing method was chosen and AISI 316 austenitic stainless steel was used. The experiments were carried out at three temperatures and for three times; Ekabor 2 was used as the boronizing agent. The detailed diffusion kinetics calculations were made using the data obtained from the experiments in the mathematical modeling.