EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

Throughout the years, there has been a great interest in developing performant alloys having good corrosion and good wear resistance. The challenge that arises is related to designing and developing cost-effective corrosion-wear resistant alloys. Within this framework, our study is a preliminary investigation to develop a competitive low-cost stainless steel having good corrosion-abrasion resistance. Two commercial stainless steel (SS) grades (in powder form) were mixed: on the one hand, an abrasion resistant pre-alloyed stainless steel (HCx®), on the other hand, a corrosion resistant stainless steel (316L). In that way, the obtained steel is expected to have both corrosion and abrasion resistance. Six mixtures with different percentages (5, 10, 15, 20, 30 and 50% of the corrosion resistant steel) were melted in a furnace under oxidizing atmosphere to simulate the melting conditions in the industry. The resulting materials were heat treated to achieve the desired microstructure and performance. The adequate temperatures for the melting and heat treatment processes were determined by means of computational thermodynamics using the Thermo-Calc© software. The obtained steels were characterized by means of Optical Microscopy (OM), Scanning Electron Microscopy coupled with Energy Dispersive X-ray (SEM-EDX) and X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) for phase identification. Corrosion and abrasion tests were conducted to evaluate the performance of the steels and the results are exhaustively discussed.
Keywords: Stainless steel, corrosion resistance, abrasion resistance, Thermo-Calc©.