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Pulsed-Plasma Nitriding Equipment with PlaSSteel-Technology
Hardening the surface of stainless steel parts and at the same time retaining the parts’ corrosion resistance presents a major technical challenge to surface engineering and manufacturing companies.
Because of their ability to resist different types of corrosion, stainless steels are used in the chemical industry, oil industry, automobile industry, food industry and paper manufacturing, the pharmaceutical and biomedical sectors and many more. Though stainless steels have excellent corrosive characteristics, they fall down on mechanical properties. While they have good ductility, the surface hardness is not so remarkable. Stainless steels are working in corrosive environments where other steels are not able do the job. However, parts made from stainless steels can fail due to different types of wear and due to fatigue, and this leads to maintenance and repairs, which means an increase in the component’s total lifecycle costs. Hardening the surface of stainless steel parts should not be at the expense of decreasing corrosion resistance!
The PlaSSteel technology reconciles the dilemma and gives a solution for surface hardening of stainless steels at no loss of corrosion resistance:
- Increase of 3-4 times of the surface hardness of the parts. This results in an increase of the wear resistance, improving the adhesive, abrasive, cavitation resistance (improvement of the part’s tribological properties).
- Kept core hardness – maintaining ductility of the steel.
- No distortion of the parts – the treatment takes place at low temperature.
- No chromium nitride or carbide precipitations which eliminates the possibility of intergranular corrosion.
- Elimination of pitting corrosion (stainless steels are most susceptible to pitting corrosion).
- Creation of inner compressive stresses, which increases the fatigue strength of the parts.
- Low cost process, because of low temperature level, very little gas consumption and short process cycles times.
The PlaSSteel process is suitable for austenitic, martensitic, ferritic, duplex and nickel base alloys.